Sheila Webb, PhD
-
This past year has been a wonderful mix of travel, new curricular innovations, and research.
I was delighted to be able to spend a week in Paris in June with my daughters. I did a year of graduate study in Paris, so it’s always a treat to visit the city, walk 18,000 steps each day, and frequent the exhibitions and street markets. We then went to Portugal and explored Lisbon. We were amazed by the tiles decorating entire facades of buildings and the textiles and pottery.
In September, I again taught the Viking Launch Photo + Design class, a success since 2015. The program is a way for first years to get acclimated and to have the chance to incorporate an academic experience with getting to know campus and all of the resources.
In light of the stressors on journalistic practice, I focused projects and presentations in the Ethics J351 class on AI and was gratified by the level of both interest and understanding of challenges by the students. We are all called to teach the required classes to get our students through the curriculum so it’s a treat to be able to teach electives. This year, my Magazine Design and Production class, in which students develop a magazine from editorial concept to audience plan to design, allowed me to do just that.
My article “Bon Appétit: A Legacy Food Magazine as a Site for Social Reckoning” appeared in Studies in Popular Culture [ 45, no. 1 (2024): 85-120]. The study approaches Bon Appétit as a lens through which to explore how recipes and profiles in the pages of the magazine construct the broader social context of food culture at a time of social turmoil.
My chapter “Jezebel — How the Digital Pioneer Exploited a New Mode of Production, Constructed an Audience, and Became the Voice of Contemporary Feminism,” will appear in the forthcoming book The Feminist Press: From The Una to Jezebel, published by the University of Illinois Press. This is an oral history of Jezebel, the groundbreaking blog, based on interviews with the founding editor Anna Holmes, the editor from 2014-2017 Emma Carmichael, and the current editor Lauren Tousignant.