A discussion of Emily Hodgson Anderson's new book, Shadow Work: Loneliness and the Literary Life (Columbia University Press, 2025). The author will be joined in conversation by Julia Lee (Loyola Marymount University) and Anahid Nersessian (UCLA), moderated by Dana Johnson (USC). Organized in partnership with the Department of English and the Early Modern Studies Institute. Registration is required. REGISTER HERE

About the Book: How is it that reading and writing can at once isolate us and bring us closer to others? Blending personal narrative with literary criticism, Emily Hodgson Anderson considers what a life spent with books has taught her about loneliness and human connection. She delves into the unseen labor of women, authors, and mothers, and she argues that we can reimagine intimacy through books. Herself a book lover and writer, a teacher of literature, and a single mom, Anderson reflects on the loneliness—and the strength—that can come from living, writing, and parenting alone.

Shadow Work puts writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Laurence Sterne, and Shakespeare into unexpected conversations with authors of children’s literature and contemporary fiction, among them Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Zadie Smith, and Lewis Carroll. Elegantly and poignantly written, this book examines what it means to revisit longtime literary companions and how literature can help us better understand what we show and hide about ourselves.

About the Author: Emily Hodgson Anderson is Professor of English and Dornsife College Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of Southern California. She is the author of two books of literary criticism, Eighteenth-Century Authorship and the Play of Fiction: Novels and the Theater, Haywood to Austen (2009) and Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss (2018), and her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Air/Light, and LitHub.

Open to attendants outside of USC. An excerpt of the book will be made available to registered attendants. Registration before the event is required. 

This event is part of the Levan Institute for the Humanities' “Book Chats” series, conversations about new books published by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. To see more events in this series, including recordings of past events, visit https://dornsife.usc.edu/levan-institute/book-chats/.