Student Snippets A Window Into The Daily Life & Thoughts of SLIS Students

Thesis

Future Plans

I feel like I blinked, and all of a sudden I’m registering for classes for my third and final year at Simmons! My graduate History thesis is right around the corner, and I can hardly believe it. I’m still deciding on my topic, but I think I’m starting to build a pretty good idea. It feels like the true adult world is coming quicker than ever. Speaking of, this past week I attended the annual Spring SLIS virtual career fair and got to meet with several awesome employers and get some ideas for my job prospects next spring. It’s exciting to hear about all the opportunities that are available for me when I graduate and all the places I can potentially work at.  Until then though, I’m happy to announce I got into all the classes that I wanted for next semester. I will be taking History 562 taught by the new faculty they hired, and LIS 442, one of the required archives courses. I did experience true senioritis though: I kept forgetting that my…


Food Advertisements

When you are writing a thesis about food, it is almost inevitable that you are going to encounter some pretty interesting examples of food culture. Thus far in my study of American food culture from the 1950s to the early 1990s, I’ve encountered fan letters to Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer-Becker the mother-daughter duo behind the Joy of Cooking. Their cookbooks promote a vast array of recipes that utilize ingredients that range from diced vegetables to box Jell-o mixed. By far my favorite thing that I’ve had to analyze in the name of academia is food advertisements from magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, and Better Homes & Gardens from the 1950s. These advertisements, which are very much products of their time, offer insight into consumer and food trends from the decade. For my paper, I am analyzing these advertisements as a means of understanding how the food and consumer industry promoted the gendering of the kitchen and the position of the home cook. The following advertisements were found within magazines that are a part of Johnson and Wales Culinary…