Welcome to the homepage of Ellen Gruber Garvey, Professor in the English Department of New Jersey City University, where she also teaches Women's and Gender Studies.

She has written a book on American magazines, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, about how advertising became an ordinary and accepted part of American media. It won the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing’s prize for the best book of 1996 on the history of the book, She has written and lectured in Europe and the U.S. on scrapbooks and on women’s bicycling, as well as on magazines, billboards, women editors, and stories about slave ships; you can hear her talk about magazines and about women's magazines on the radio show “Odyssey.” Dr. Garvey’s current book project, Book, Paper, Scissors: Scrapbooks Remake Print Culture, tells about how ordinary readers made use of the public realm of newspapers and magazines in documenting their lives and their reading and writing. It is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She welcomes comments on an article that grows out of it, "Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Appropriation Scrapbooks and Extra-illustration " in the online history magazine Common-place. Her chapter in New Media: 1740-1915, edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoff Pingree, "Scissorizing and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth Century Reading, Remaking, and Recirculating," has been discussed on blogs.  She worked with Sharon Harris on the collection  Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals .
    She is past President of the New York Metro American Studies Association  and the Research Society for American Periodicals, whose website she created (check out the Resources page). She recently returned from a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and a fellowship at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC, working on a book about 19th century scrapbooks. She has held the Fulbright Walt Whitman Distinguished Lecturing Chair in American Literature in the Netherlands, fellowships at the Massachusetts Historical Society and the American Antiquarian Society, and other fellowships.