News Releases

Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance by Dr. Ellen Gruber Garvey, a professor of English at New Jersey City University, has been published by Oxford University Press.

Writing with Scissors explores how ordinary and extraordinary Americans from all walks of life, ranging from farmers and janitors to Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony, created scrapbooks to document, share, and critique press accounts of events, thereby shaping an alternate media and creating their own democratic archives.

The 314-page groundbreaking book, which features more than 60 rare illustrations, reveals how people have had an interactive, personal, passionate, and often critical relationship with the media long before the Internet era. By cutting out and pasting down what they read into blank books, old textbooks, or the pre-gummed scrapbook that Mark Twain invented, people claimed ownership of their reading and then shared it with their family and community. Dr. Garvey’s book presents scrapbooks as the ancestors of social media and of digital ways of organizing and understanding information.

Dr. Garvey is also the author of The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s-1910s, winner of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing’s prize for the best book of 1996 on the history of the book, and, with Sharon Harris, helped edit Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals.

Dr. Garvey has been speaking on Writing with Scissors at universities, historical societies, and libraries around the country. She has also lectured extensively throughout Europe, Canada, and the United States on such topics as women’s bicycling, billboards, stories about slave ships, magazines, and women editors.

Dr. Garvey has held the Fulbright Walt Whitman Distinguished Chair in American Literature in the Netherlands and has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, Massachusetts Historical Society, and American Antiquarian Society.

A member of the NJCU faculty since 1994, Dr. Garvey teaches English and women’s and gender studies courses. She also co-edits the University’s Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. Her teaching interests include 19th-century American literature, print culture, popular literature, lesbian and gay literature, and children's literature.

Dr. Garvey has also taught at Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Massachusetts, and has worked as a journalist, printer, and editor.

She is a past president of the New York Metro American Studies Association and the Research Society for American Periodicals.