Emily Hodgson Anderson

Emily Hodgson Anderson is Professor of English and Dornsife College Dean of Undergraduate Education 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 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 she does public-facing writing for venues such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Rambling, Air/Light, and LitHub. Trained specifically in 18th-century literature and culture, she has spent her scholarly life thinking about the practices of authorship: what writers are compelled to write; why they write it down; and how, historically, they have made a profession of their work.

Her new book is titled "Ghostwriting: A Secret History, from God to A.I." She lives in Los Angeles with her two boys.