Welcome to the homepage of Ellen Gruber Garvey, Associate Professor in the English Department of New Jersey City University, where she also teaches Women's 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. 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 an NEH fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, working on a book about 19th century scrapbooks. She has held the Fulbright Walt Whitman Distinguished Lecturing Chair in American Literature in the Netherlands and other fellowships. For academic year 2007-08 she is on leave as the Research Triangle Foundation fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina; for 2008-09 she is on  leave on a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, designated a We the People fellow.