Laura Mitchell, longtime contributor and social media editor for the Recipes Project, recently stepped down after seven years of service. The editorial team will greatly miss her enthusiastic and reliable contributions and insights! While Laura has carefully maintained the Recipes Project’s social media presence for several years, she originally contributed her scholarship on medieval charms (beginning with this post in 2012). You can read some of Laura’s perspectives on the Recipes Project from the blog’s fifth anniversary. We recently chatted a bit more about her time with the Recipes Project.
Laura, you have been a part of the Recipes Project from the beginning. What sort of scope and impact did you hope it would have when it started? Has it met your expectations?
I didn’t really know what to expect with this project. Academic blogs still felt very new to me so I think I would have been happy if the blog had lasted a couple of years, let alone seven! Lisa and Elaine very graciously involved me in some of the earlier meetings of the editors and it was very interesting to see the project emerge from the ground up. I think it’s safe to say that the Recipes Project has far exceeded my expectations!
How have your contributions to the Recipes Project changed over time?
Initially I was just a contributor. I had finished my PhD in 2011 and this was an easy way to share some of the fun bits of my dissertation work that wouldn’t fit in an article. At that time Lisa was covering all the social media for the Recipes Project. After a few years as a contributor, she asked me to take over the social media for her and that’s what I’d been doing ever since. The last post I wrote for the Recipes Project was on animal charms in 2015. I’d started working outside academia in 2014 and I stopped doing academic research around that time too.
Has anything surprised you while growing the project’s social media presence over the past five years?
Honestly, one thing that has surprised me is the lack of trolls, even when we’ve posted on topics like transgender history, reproductive healthcare, or even labour issues like the 2018 UCU strike. I sort of took it for granted that a social media presence would attract bots and trolls to our accounts, but on the whole our audience is just really great! People tag us for help on Twitter, or just to tell us about something cool they’re doing. Our social media team has had lots of interesting conversations with people responding to our posts or to queries we’ve sent out.
Do you have any favorite posts or series?
Oh, there are so many! I love the interviews with libraries and museums. There are so many interesting collections out there and so many libraries I was not familiar with. Even the really well-known libraries, like at Cambridge or the British Library, are full of surprising items.
One thing that the Recipes Project does that I really love is highlight student research. Especially now that the blog has really grown its readership, I think it’s wonderful the way this blog has become a vehicle to share graduate and undergraduate student research. It’s such a great affirmation of the great work that students can do in the classroom and I love seeing how they interact with their sources. Some of my favourite student posts include Alana Martini recreating Egyptian makeup in “What’s In an Ancient Egyptian Makeup Bag?”; Emma Bragdon examining the role of beef in an American Senator’s political career in “Smothered Beef: The Role of Meat in Margaret Chase Smith’s Foodways”; and Molly Taylor-Poleskey recreating beer soup in “Beer soup: The Breakfast of Early Modern Rulers”.
Finally, I think one of the most interesting series we’ve done was the virtual conference on “What is a Recipe?” in 2017. I want to commend the editors for coming up with some really neat and innovative formats for hosting a virtual conference including blog posts, Facebook Live video discussions, Pinterest boards, Twitter, and Instagram and involving all our readers, not just the academics. The care and consideration that the team put into it was really clear throughout the conference.
What projects and opportunities await you now?
Just over a year ago I moved back to my hometown of Saskatoon and started working at St. Thomas More College. My new job is a bit of a switch for me from project management on a multi-year grant to research facilitation and grant administration for the college. I really love working with the faculty here and helping them develop their research programs. I’m really excited to develop in this field and see where it takes me.
Finally, I just wanted to say thank you to the editors of the Recipes Project for all their hard work over the years, thank you for inviting me to participate! I’d also like to thank the rest of the social media team, Melissa Reynolds and Clare Gordon for being a dream team to work with since they joined last year. They have done a fabulous job so far and I’ll be eagerly following them!
Thanks, Laura! We all wish you the best in your future endeavors!
If you’d like to feature a project, scholar, or institution on Around the Table, please email Sarah Kernan.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sarah Kernan (January 21, 2020). Around the Table: Celebrating Our Contributors. The Recipes Project. Retrieved September 15, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/td8r