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Professor Ted Sheckels |
9/25/12
On September 12, 2012, Randolph-Macon College
English and
Communication Studies Professor Ted Sheckels presented a program at the Robert J. Dole Institute for the Study of Politics, on the campus of the University of Kansas. The program focused on Sheckels’ book,
Gender and the American Presidency: Nine Presidential Women and the Barriers They Faced (Lexington Press, 2012). Sheckels was joined onstage with co-authors Nichola Gutgold (The Pennsylavania State University) and Diana Carlin (St. Louis University).
The program was filmed in C-SPAN2’s Book TV format, and the three co-authors were interviewed by the director of the Dole Center, William Lacy. After the interview they took questions from the audience.
The interview will be aired on Saturday, September 29, at 11 p.m. on C-SPAN2’s Book TV program. Sheckels describes the book as a “follow-up to separate books on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign that Gutgold and I wrote. We thought that we needed to ask, more generally, what factors are keeping women from being considered presidential. We asked Diana Carlin to join us, and we looked at nine women with an eye to developing a theoretical explanation based on their stories.”
Sheckels wrote the chapters on Barbara Mikulski, Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein. The theoretical explanation, in the book’s concluding chapter, has been featured on several Web sites.
Sheckels joined the faculty in 1980. He earned his B.S. from Duquesne University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University. He is the director of the Forensics Program, the director of Speaking Across the Curriculum and the chair of the Communication Studies Department. In addition, Sheckels was the A.G. Ingram Professor of English from 2008-2011, and from 1987-2006 he served as director of the Summer Session. He is also the author of
The Political in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction: The Writing on the Wall of the Tent (Ashgate, 2012) and
Political Communication in the Anglophone World (Lexington Press, October 2012).