[Commlist] The Ghost Reader: CFP

  Calls for Papers

*July 2, 2019*

*Call for Contributions*

*The Ghost Reader: Recovering Women’s Contributions to Communication 
Studies, 1925-1968 (Europe and North America)*

Editors: Carol Stabile, University of Oregon, and Elena Hristova, 
Regent’s University London

“She did not go along with the crowd. Not because she was a Negro. She 
was not; she was White. Not because she was an Indian, but because a 
Southern White woman said that slavery was a cancer eating into our 
national life, and that it will in the end destroy us if we do not wipe 
it out; because she talked about the churches who sent missionaries to 
Africa and yet held slaves in their own backyard … that woman’s name has 
been wiped out of history!” (Shirley Graham Du Bois, “As a Man Thinketh 
in His Heart, So Is He,” /Parish News: Church of the Holy Trinity/, 
February 1954)

“If libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are ghost 
libraries of all the stories that have not. The ghosts outnumber the 
books by some unimaginably vast sum. Even those who have been audible 
have often earned the privilege through strategic silences or the 
inability to hear certain voices, including their own.” (Rebecca Solnit, 
/The Mother of All Questions/, p. 21)

We are seeking contributions to a volume titled /The Ghost Reader: 
Recovering Women’s Contributions to Communication Studies, 1925-1968 
(Europe and North America)/. /The Ghost Reader/ will be an edited print 
volume and an online publication (part of the Reanimate Collective 
<http://roopikarisam.github.io/reanimate/>’s publishing ecology), 
featuring research, scholarship, and criticism produced by women between 
1925 and 1968. These two volumes will address the absence of scholarship 
and media criticism written by women working in the overlapping fields 
that contributed to the formation of communication, media, and cultural 
studies research in the first half of the twentieth century. We hope 
that it will also encourage research on these scholars, critics, and 
activists.

In North America and Europe, some groups of progressive women made 
inroads into universities during the first half of the twentieth 
century, completing undergraduate degrees and receiving PhDs from 
research universities. Others, excluded from the academy by virtue of 
race or class, analyzed and criticized media industries, as journalists 
and activists. Often, these bodies of work developed innovative theories 
of communication and methods for the study of the media, as well as 
anticipating ideas, approaches, and concerns that would not reappear 
again until the 1970s. Anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, for example, 
conducted extensive ethnographic research into race and gender in her 
study of the American South, as well as her innovative ethnography of 
the film industry. Sociologist Helen MacGill Hughes wrote about the 
human interest story, reflecting her generation’s interest in areas of 
media production that were devalued or marginalized within mainstream 
communication research. Mae Dena Huettig wrote the first industrial 
analysis of the film industry, before leaving research altogether to 
focus on political activism. African American scholars and intellectuals 
such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claudia Jones, Shirley Graham, Fredi 
Washington, and others wrote media criticism for the black press (/The 
People’s Voice/, the /Chicago Defender/, the /Pittsburgh Courier/, etc.) 
and scholarly or literary journals such as the /Negro Digest/ and 
/Freedomways/.

Little of this work is taught today, particularly in courses mapping the 
emergence of the field of communication/media studies. /The Ghost 
Reader/ addresses these absences, publishing previously unpublished, 
out-of-print or under-reviewed materials in two formats. The first is a 
print anthology for use in classrooms, comprised of selections of 
writings by women. The second is an open access reader that will include 
a broader range of scholarship; a volume that can evolve and expand as 
new scholarship comes to light or is curated by future contributors. The 
volume will be organized into subfields (anthropology, audience studies, 
economics, performance studies, etc.), with a concluding section on 
speculation and methods. Goldsmiths Press has expressed interest in the 
proposal, and we aim to submit a full proposal to the press in Fall 2020.

By restoring to view the work that women did during this seminal era in 
the history of our fields, /The Ghost Reader/ underscores their 
participation in broader conversations about media, media industries, 
and popular culture that have since been neglected. It also shows how 
women’s scholarly work was often appropriated by established male 
scholars or excluded from legacy-building and citational practices 
within the field.

A partial list of women for whom we are seeking contributions appears at 
the end of this call. We are eager for authors to contribute additional 
names and ideas.

We encourage collaborative contributions to this project. Contributors 
will be expected to submit a letter of interest and short (no more than 
500-word) abstract listing the scholar/researcher you will be 
contributing to /The Ghost Reader/ by September 1, 2019. Full 
submissions, including the following information, are due on June 1, 2020.

 1. An introduction of no more than 1,000 words in plain text (.txt),
    Word (.doc or .docx), or Markdown (.md) (no pdfs) for the person
    whose work they are compiling, that includes a discussion of the
    continued relevance of this work to the field of
    communication/critical/cultural/media studies;
 2. Two articles to be contributed to the volume by the person whose
    work they are compiling, as well as images. These articles will need
    to be provided in plain text (.txt), Word (.doc or .docx), or
    Markdown (.md), along with pdfs of the original articles. The
    Reanimate Collective can work with contributors on file formats;
 3. Copyright permissions for the two articles, as well as images, or a
    record of good faith attempts to locate the copyright holder for
    orphan works. The Reanimate Collective can work with contributors on
    copyright issues;
 4. A bibliography with additional citations by the person whose work
    they are compiling;
 5. Five keywords, as well as an indication as to which section of the
    book the person whose work they are compiling should be included.

Because of the co-editors’ areas of expertise, this volume focuses on 
Europe and North America. We hope that scholars in additional regions 
and national contexts will be able to use this as a model for creating 
their own Ghost Readers and are eager to field inquiries about those.

Please send inquiries and submissions to (ghostreader2020 /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(ghostreader2020 /at/ gmail.com)>. We look forward to hearing from you.

Carol Stabile, Professor
University of Oregon, USA

Elena Hristova, Lecturer
Regent’s University London, UK

*
*

*List of possible subjects*


Gretel Adorno
Thelma Ehrlich Anderson
Marcela Averisti
Ruth Benedict
Hallie Quinn Brown
Helen Butcher
Eunice Cooper
Rosalind Coward
Marjorie Fiske
Jenny Garber
Hazel Gaudet
Rose Kohn Goldsen
Shirley Graham
Jeanette Green
Ruth Harper
Herta Herzog
Dorothy Hobson
Mae Dena Huettig
Helen MacGill Hughes
Zora Neale Hurston
Esther Cooper Jackson
Marie Jahoda
Claudia Jones
Babette Kass
Patricia L. Kendall
Rose Kohn
Dorothy Kopp
Gladys Lang
Eleanor Leacock
Queenie Leavis
Dina Levi-Strauss
Helen Merrell Lynd
Thelma McCormack
Margaret Mead
Audley Moore
Louise Moses
Pauli Murray
Elsie Clews Parsons
Louise Thompson Patterson
Hortense Powdermaker
Pearla Primus
Sheila Rowbotham
Patricia Salter / West
Jeanette Sayre
Yole Sills
Dorothy Helen Smith
Pam Taylor
Dorothy Thompson
Fredi Washington
Gene Weltfish
Janice Winship


/The editors are grateful to Hadil Abuhmaid for suggesting the title for 
this volume, as well as Michelle Dreiling, Madison Heath, and 
Christopher St. Louis who worked on contributions to this volume as part 
of their course work./


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