Ghost Writing: The Secret History of the No Bodies Who Write
Where: Hershey Hall Salon
Please join us on Friday May 2nd at 1:30pm for a public lecture by Emily Hodgson Anderson, “Ghost Writing: The Secret History of the No Bodies Who Write.”
Location: Hershey Hall Salon
Lunch is offered; RSVP here to attend.
“Ghost Writing: The Secret History of the No Bodies Who Write.”
We’ve probably all had this thought, recently, reading a campus-wide email, or a student essay, or the transcript of a politician’s speech: who really wrote these words?
The looming presence of AI is clearly one reason why this question is at the forefront of our minds—but the question also predates AI and brings up new questions of its own.
When is an author not an author?
The question might feel like the set up for a joke with Barthes or Foucault as the punchline, however, in this talk, Emily Hodgson Anderson’s answer to this question will take us in a different direction.
When is an author not an author? When an author uses a ghostwriter ….
Understood broadly as the act of one person writing in another person’s name, the practice has, according to many ghostwriters, been around since written language itself. And yet the implementation, and acknowledgment, of this practice have varied greatly over time. Who are these invisible figures? Why do they do what they do? And why do they remain disembodied— behind the scenes? In part a cultural history of this mysterious and intuitively captivating profession, in part an exposé of how contemporary professional ghostwriting works, this public lecture uses ghostwriting to animate the questions posed by the workshop on the No-Body Problem.
Emily Hodgson Anderson is Professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Education for Dornsife College at USC. She is the author of two books of literary criticism, Eighteenth-Century Authorship and the Play of Fiction (Routledge, 2009) and Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss (University of Michigan Press, 2018). She is also author of the newly published cross-over book Shadow Work: Loneliness and the Literary Life (Columbia UP 2025). For five years, she served as the editor-in-chief for the academic journal The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (University of Pennsylvania Press). Her academic work has appeared in the journals PMLA, ELH, and Studies in the Novel, among others, and her public-facing writing has appeared in places such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Rambling, LitHub and Air/Light. She is currently at work on a new book titled Ghostwriting: A Secret History, from God to AI.