Weston, Mary Ann
Biography
Journalism professor Mary Ann (Damme) Weston earned both her bachelor’s (1962) and master’s (1963) degrees at the Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Weston taught two courses at Medill in 1974-1975, then returned to Medill in 1987 to teach for 18 years, until 2005. In 1997 and 2003, she was the faculty member in charge of the Global Journalism program, and from 1998 to 2001 she served as Medill’s Associate Dean. Her research focused on minorities and women in the news, 20th-century Chicago journalism, newspaper comic strips, and the portrayal of women in newspaper editorials. She retired from full-time teaching in 2005 and was appointed Associate Professor Emeritus.
Weston served on a number of important committees both within Medill and University-wide. As the Medill representative to the General Faculty Committee (GFC) in the mid-1990s, she worked on changes to the University’s summer benefits policies. From 1996 to 1999, she was a member of the Inquiry, a committee focused on analyzing and improving Medill’s graduate programs. She chaired the GFC’s sub-committee on Faculty Development: Women and Minorities, which included work on the University’s policies for dealing with Sexual Harassment, and comments on the University’s First Report of the Task Force on Underrepresented Minorities in 1997. In addition, she served on Northwestern’s Martin Luther King Day Coordinating Committee from its formation in 1999 (the first campus-wide celebration took place in January, 2000) through 2001.
Her teaching work included both undergraduate and graduate courses, many of which were team-taught or involved participation from visiting faculty or journalists. She also taught summer course for high-school students as part of Northwestern’s National High School Institute, and a course for teachers of journalism at the high-school level. In 1999 she successfully applied for a grant from the Alumnae of Northwestern University to introduce a course on Reporting across Race and Culture.
Weston wrote Native Americans in the News: Images of American Indians in the Twentieth Century (Greenwood Press, 1996). She also co-edited and co-authored U.S. News Coverage of Racial Minorities: A Sourcebook, 1934-1996 (Greenwood Press, 1997), and contributed a chapter, "Post 9/11 Arab American Coverage Avoids Stereotypes" in Media in an American Crisis: Studies of September 11, 2001 (University Press of America, 2005). She contributed to a number of publications including the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, the Dictionary of American Biography, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography; in addition, she wrote numerous articles and book reviews that have appeared in Journalism History, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the Journal of Islamic Law and Culture, and the Newspaper Research Journal.
After her retirement from Medill, Professor Weston continued to conduct research regarding the representation of minorities and women in the news.