Austin Anderson

Bio

Austin Anderson Ph.D is a Provostial Fellow at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Critical Game Studies Lab. He specializes in game studies and African American literature, with a particular focus on the burgeoning field critical race game studies. He is especially interested in how games are enmeshed with race, gender, identity, and class while also examining the liberatory potentials of gameworlds. His research and teaching interests also include African American literature, contemporary American fiction, media and comic studies, and Japanese popular culture ranging from manga to anime to video games.

His first book, Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies, uses the concepts of repetition and recursion to develop a formalist methodology for analyzing videogames as racial-cultural projects. It offers racial recursivity as a method to explore the underlying racial ideology within videogames, surfaces how these ideologies are manifested in game aesthetics, describes how these aesthetics connect to historical ideas of and around race, and argues that this process creates a self-referential feedback loop by its repetitious reoccurrence. The first part of the book examines how various ludic-textual structures of videogames draw upon racial logics in culture and recursively reinforce them through self-naturalizing repetition. The second part of the book uses the racial recursivity methodology to explore three sustained case studies. Drawing together race studies, literary studies, and game studies, the book offers a first of its kind formalist critical race studies methodology for game studies.

He has published in the fields of game studies, African American literary studies, and comic studies, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Transformative Works and Culture, Electronic Book Review, KULA, The Comparatist, Popular Culture Review, ADE Bulletin, ASAP/Review, and other outlets. He is currently co-organizing a volume (with David Hall) that explores Japanese videogame perspectives on Western aesthetics. He currently serves as an MLA Delegate, co-chair of the SCMS Precarious Labor Committee, and member of the Multiplay Editorial Board.

Academic Appointments

• Lecturer, English

Professional Education

• BA, Texas Wesleyan University, English (2017)
• MA, New York University, English (2020)
• PhD, Howard University, English (2025)