Haunting Fame: Reverberations of Academic Celebrity in the Past and Future
Alexandra Olsvik
PhD Student
University of Alberta
As an undergraduate student beginning a survey class on early 18th-century English literature and culture, I was first met with the usual collection of texts written by men and for men, which made literary culture and celebrity seem as if they were comprised solely of people like Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and Henry Fielding. Memory theorist Aleida Assmann (2011) asserts that cultural memory, as a top-down approach to memory, simultaneously erects and affirms canons of knowledge that educational institutions employ to categorize and identify cultural artifacts. So, if an individual wants to be identified as someone who shares cultural memory and participates in a specific culture, their sense of identity and values should conform to the norms issued by cultural memory.
I was surprised when, halfway through the semester, another professor — a woman whose specialization was women’s writing — took the class. Our old syllabus was written over, and we began with Hester Thrale and Catharine Macaulay. As the story goes, in 18th-century England, an elite group of intellectual women collectively gathered from historical margins to make space for their work in a society structured to exclude them (Talbot, 2024). Collectively known as the Bluestocking, these women became celebrated exceptions. As historian Susannah Gibson (2024) points out, the Bluestockings’ celebrity, however, often drew a mix of gallantry and condescension from the public, who generally defined women in relation to their bodies — i.e., virgins, mothers, whores — which resulted in constraint and conformity as they promoted “straight and narrow” respectability and moral position as the pinnacle of rationalism.
Nostalgia for the “Golden Age”
Among other such stories, the Bluestockings illuminates the allure and limitations of the past. Thrale and Macaulay remind us that women, if they were born with enough privilege to do so, could, and did, assert themselves as intellectuals and public figures. Still, gaining legitimacy meant presenting elements of conformity and sacrificing radical potential. Insisting on rationality and respectability as the foundation of their intellectualism framed the Bluestockings’ challenges to patriarchy. Though culturally disruptive, their impetus led them back toward prevailing cultural narratives, which later feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) and Sarah Ahmed (2017) would make efforts to transform.
Academic Celebrity in the Digital Age
In the 21st century, platforms such as YouTube, Twitter/X, and TED offer scholars various ways to connect with audiences beyond academia. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has used TED Talks to share transformative ideas about feminism and culture, while Angela Davis’s digital presence continues to highlight her decades of transformative activism and intellectual work. On a positive note, these platforms make knowledge accessible, available, and polyvocal — as Yuri Lotman (1976) offered, “information is beauty” (p. 123). However, digital media also cull a performative engagement that sometimes feels antithetical to the work of scholarship, and algorithms present repetitive information. Not unlike the Bluestockings, contemporary women intellectuals face a double bind: these platforms extend the reach of intellectual communities as much as they open them to contempt and scrutiny.
Feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian’s (2013–2017) critique of misogyny in video games ignited intense online abuse, focussing on both her appearance and scholarship (see Webber, 2017). In consonance with Webber’s experience, Amnesty International (2020) found women on Twitter experience abusive or problematic tweets every 30 seconds, with women of colour disproportionately affected. Comments focussing on women’s bodies, tone, and “likability” continue to haunt substantive engagement with their work, echoing the ways 18th-century women intellectuals were reduced to categories tied to their bodies.
Moreover, the rise of “influencer academics” commodifies knowledge into digestible, marketable content — the “fast knowledge” favoured by late capitalism (Orr, 1986) — which risks diminishing the depth and rigour of scholarly inquiry by privileging visibility and branding over critical engagement and more attentive processes of knowledge production. Platforms such as TED Talks or Instagram demand brevity and accessibility and are often simplified for mass appeal. Transforming intellectual labour into a product echoes the proliferation of neoliberal values that promote individual branding over collective inquiry. Scholars are often incentivized to “perform” their expertise in ways that dilute the particularity of their work, making fame both a privilege and a trap.
Speculative Futures: Hauntological and Relational Imaginaries
As I reflect on figures such as Thrale, Macaulay, and Wollstonecraft, I wonder: what could academic celebrity look like in the future?
Reframing academic celebrity through hauntology (Derrida, 1994) involves acknowledging the unfinished projects of figures like the Bluestockings while critiquing the systemic barriers that hindered their progress. These ‘unfinished projects’ encompass the intellectual endeavours and ideas the Bluestockings sought to advance but could not fully actualize due to the structural constraints they encountered. Tracing the ways such struggles endure draws our attention to voices and work that continue to be appropriated or erased.
Feminist Futures in Digital Spaces
Reanimating and transposing relational, collaborative intellectual traditions — such as the salons of the Bluestockings — might help us imagine other ways of valuing intellectual work that prioritizes relationships and collective inquiry over personal branding. Such a shift would contest the market-driven logic that underpins modern academic celebrity, replacing it with a model rooted in care, reciprocity, and shared responsibility for knowledge production.
Initiatives like the Feminist Internet (2022), which aims to create online spaces that center inclusivity, equality, and collaborative learning, offer glimpses of what could be possible were we to cultivate relational and community-driven approaches to intellectual work. Engaging with speculative possibilities, hauntology offers a possible mode of projecting a different kind of future.
References
Amnesty International. (2020, September 22). Twitter still failing women over online violence and abuse. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2020/09/twitter-failing-women-over-online-violence-and-abuse/
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
Assmann, A. (2011). Cultural memory and western civilization: Functions, media, archives. Cambridge University Press.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. Routledge.
Feminist Internet. (2022). https://www.feministinternet.com
Gibson, S. (2024). The Bluestockings: A history of the first women’s movement. W. W. Norton & Company.
Lotman, I. M. (1976). Analysis of the poetic text. Ardis.
Sarkeesian, A. (Producer). (2013–2017). Tropes vs. women in video games [Web series]. Feminist Frequency. https://feministfrequency.com/series/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games/
Talbot, M. (2024, July 15). The original Bluestockings were fiercer than you imagined. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/15/the-original-bluestockings
Wollstonecraft, M. (1792). A vindication of the rights of woman. J. Johnson.
Webber, J. E. (2017, October 16). Anita Sarkeesian: ‘It’s frustrating to be known as the woman who survived #Gamergate’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/16/anita-sarkeesian-its-frustrating-to-be-known-as-the-woman-who-survived-gamergate
