Libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are the libraries of all the stories that have not.
We catch glimpses of these ‘ghosts’ in footnotes and bibliographies, but mostly they are buried altogether, casualties of dense citational and intellectual networks, editorial decisions, shifting ideas about relevance and value, and the structural inequalities that have shaped academia, libraries, and other knowledge-producing institutions.
The Ghost Reader edited by Dr Elen D. Hristova, Lecturer in Film and Media at Bangor University along with Aimee-Marie Dorsten, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at Point Park University in Pittsburgh and Carol A. Stabile, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon offers a fresh perspective on the intellectual history of the field of media studies, that encompasses the overlapping fields of communication studies, cultural studies, and film studies.
The book recovers and republishes the work of a diverse group of women who laboured at the margins of media studies as it took shape during the formative years of communication research between the 1930s and the 1950s. It provides scholarly contexts for this work, and shows that “intersectional considerations” - such as gender, race, class, as well as patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism, were key modes of engagement for intellectuals, academics, and activists who happened to be women. They did so decades before feminist perspectives were reintegrated into histories of the field.
Chapters in the book take one woman at a time, exploring their contribution to media studies through their work in anthropology, political economy of communication, audience studies, public opinion and propaganda, activism, critical theory, psychology, social psychology, public culture, film analysis, sociology, media law and regulation, journalism, news broadcasting, and criticism.
The reasons we may not know about these women include discrimination against women in academic employment, the diversion of women into the advertising industry or into research centres as assistants, as well as racism, anti-communism and their lasting legacies.
“The women we present in this book were often prevented from gaining tenure-track academic employment, all the while conducting their own important research and supporting their husbands’ academic careers. University nepotism clauses meant that only one could be employed at the university department; and that one was most often the husband. For example, in the case of Helen Merrell Lynd, her significant contribution to Middletown: A Study in American Culture (1929) was appropriated when her husband wanted to submit the book as his sole-authored doctoral dissertation.
“Women of colour, who experienced further marginalisation and exclusion from the academy published their criticism and journalism in newspapers. In the case of Trinidad and Tobago-born Claudia Jones, after being deported from the US in 1955 for her Communist Party membership, she came to London. She was an important figure in the UK Caribbean community and in 1958 started the West Indian Gazette, and later founded the Notting Hill Carnival. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery in London; to the left of Karl Marx.
“The Ghost Reader invites its readers, as well as students using the book in their classes, to build on the intellectual legacies of these women. And to continue the feminist historical recovery efforts that are sweeping across wide range of academic disciplines from computational biology to media studies!”
The Ghost Reader is published by Goldsmiths Press and distributed by MIT Press. For more information visit: https://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press/publications/the-ghost-reader/
Edited by Elena D. Hristova, Aimee-Marie Dorsten, Carol A. Stabile
Contributors:
Hadil Abuhmaid, Miche Dreiling, Diana Kamin, Marianne Kinkel, Tiffany Kinney, Elana Levine, Malia Mulligan, Morning Glory Ritchie, Gretchen Soderlund, Shelley Stamp, Laura Strait, Rafiza Varão,
