Associate Professor
Year Started at JMU: 2022
burgerjh@jmu.edu
Contact Info
Website: https://github.com/joostburgers
Spring 2026
ON LEAVE
Office: Keezell 223
Specialization
Narrative visualization and literary demography, Qualitative GIS, Global modernisms, and William Faulkner
Education
Ph.D., 2012, English and American Studies, City University of New York
M.A., 2005, Literary Studies, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
B.A., 2003, Liberal Arts, University College Utrecht, The Netherlands
Major Grants
Humanities Initiatives at Colleges and Universities, Director, Teaching and Learning William Faulkner in the Digital Age, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2022-2024
Collaborative Research Grant, Associate Director, Digital Yoknapatawpha, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2017 - 2020
Digital Startup Grant, Collaborative Editor, Digital Yoknapatawpha, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2011 - 13
Challenge Grant for Two Year Colleges, Participating Faculty, Teaching the Holocaust, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2013 - 14
Recent Work
Digital Projects:
Creator and Coder, “Race and Place: Visualizing Racial Demography in Yoknapatawpha”, Digital Yoknapatawpha, 2020
Creator and Coder, “The Art of Faulkner’s Narrative Technique”, Digital Yoknapatawpha, 2019
Creator and Coder, “Narrative Structure Analysis” ,Digital Yoknapatawpha, 2018
Publications:
“Faulkner at 30,000 Feet: Locations, Characters, and Events in the Digital Yoknapatawpha Database” Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Theresa Towner. University of Virginia Press, 2022.
“Imagining the Continuously Present Past: Visualizing William Faulkner’s Narratives and Digital Yoknapatawpha.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 015, no. 2, June 2021.
“Familial Places in Jim Crow Spaces: Kinship, Demography, and the Color Line in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, vol. 5, no. 2, July 2020.
