William Channing Webb is a fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft, who makes his first appearance in the 1928 short story "The Call of Cthulhu". He is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University and "an explorer of no slight note." When Inspector John Raymond Legrasse conferred with a meeting of the American Anthropology Society about the Cthulhu Cult, Professor Webb was the only member of the assembly to be familiar with an idol found during the raid and the ritualistic chants used by the cult, based on his investigation of a "singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux" he encountered "high up on the West Greenland coast" in 1860.