Matthew A. Andersson

Matt received his B.A. from Knox College.

While at Knox College, I defended two honors theses, the first in health psychology and the second in English. The former investigated, through a controlled experiment, how and why expressive writing leads to changes in well-being (and how this relates to the issue of pronouns), concluding that a third-person, removed approach to writing about traumatic events produces insights just like a first-person, immersed approach, but also may provide the added benefits of buffered exposure and greater self-revelation. The latter thesis took shape as a manuscript of poems touching on cultural notions of self, humor, technology, imagination, and the life course. Resulting from where I’ve been as a scholar and writer, then, my first-year inclinations as a graduate student lie in the areas of belief and identity, with an emphasis on how Western culture informs who we are, what we strive after, and how we narrate and justify our lives.