The Ghost Reader

The scholarship, research, and criticism of women who developed key theories of communication and methods for the study of media.

The Ghost Reader: Recovering Women's Contributions to Media Studies offers a fresh perspective on the intellectual history of the field of media studies, a broad scholarly field that encompasses the interdisciplinary and overlapping fields of media studies, cultural studies, and communication studies. By recovering the work of the diverse group of women who labored at the margins of media studies as it took shape during the formative years of communication research between the 1930s and the 1950s, and providing scholarly contexts for this work, The Ghost Reader shows that “intersectional considerations” 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.

Listening for ghosts turns out to mean attending to a substantial history of forgotten work, over-looked contribution, and untraced influence. A fascinating and important contribution to media studies from incisive feminist scholars.

The book's editors and contributors reconstruct, from archival leavings and buried publications, a haunting record of stolen credit, academic exile, and roads not taken... The Ghost Reader is the most important contribution to date of the field's long overdue historiographical reckoning.

Edited by Elena D. Hristova, Aimee-Marie Dorsten and Carol A. Stabile

Dr. Elena D. Hristova is Lecturer in Film and Media at Bangor University, Wales.

Dr. Aimee-Marie Dorsten is Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at Point Park University.

Carol A. Stabile is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon.