Wed 11 March 2015 at 6.00 pm

Public Lecture by Leander Reeves

Our long love affair with magazines: portraying confidence from the 18th century to the present day

Public lecture by Leander Reeves, Senior Lecturer in Publishing

Taking Place: JHB Lecture Theatre, John Henry Brookes Building, Headington Campus

Magazines act as the ultimate social barometer, cataloguing our insecurities, dreams and manners. Confidence comes in many guises - beauty, power, sex, body, social standing - which depend as much on social hierarchy as the time period it lives in. Intertwined with fashion, it is as much of a social barometer of society as the magazines in which it is illustrated.

Faith, hope, gender and societal pressures help shape our relationship with confidence - a relationship often mediated by magazines for commercial and editorial gain. But where does confidence come from? And who grants it?

This lecture aims to unravel some of these relationships, hierarchies and codes.

Leander Reeves is a graduate of Oxford Brookes with an MA in Electronic Media.  Her principal teaching and research interests are in magazine publishing. 

Leander is co-organiser for the 2015 international conference, Consuming/Culture: Women and Girls in Print and Pixels