Many academics spent the summer poring over manuscripts or rustling up new source documents at archives. But not Ellen Gerl.
Gerl spent a richly-deserved several months traveling across the United States, stopping to mountain bike along the way. And she’s headed back out on the road soon, this time to New Mexico, where she’ll spend several weeks prepping for her daughter’s wedding at a ranch that served as inspiration for painter Georgia O’Keeffe.
Following decades of teaching, Gerl retired as an associate professor at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University this May. While at OU, Gerl taught public relations writing and magazine feature writing courses. Prior to joining the academic world, Gerl spent more than fifteen years in public relations positions in healthcare and higher-education settings.
We sat down over coffee to look back on Gerl’s historical research, the ways she integrated her work and teaching, and advice she had for budding historians.
What has retired life been like so far? It’s a very free feeling. I’ve been reading for fun! I’ve been reading everything from mysteries by Louise Penny to nonfiction on distracted driving.
People have been asking me about doing a travel blog, but I’d rather just travel and enjoy it.
What is the most recent historical research project you have worked on? I have no plans for books or anything like that. But I will probably do some part-time magazine writing. One or two of those will likely pull from my research. I presented a research-in-progress [at AJHA] on a woman automotive journalist, Denise McCluggage, near the end of my time teaching. Rather than put that into an academic journal, I’d like to put that in a consumer publication. I do want to do something with it. I have some things in mind with essays on home and food that I want to play around with, too.
I’m also toying with the idea of a young adult biography on Virginia Apgar. I published a Journalism History article and did some sabbatical research on her.
I also presented some of my research on one specific part of Collier’s history at the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies conference, and I’d like to get that published somewhere.
How did you come to your area of scholarship? People coming into academic work from the profession have this need to find ways to parlay their skills and use their abilities to tell stories of interesting people. It’s very similar to profile writing. Pat Washburn, Mike Sweeney, and Marilyn Greenwald were great mentors and historians. Everyone was very supportive, and we all loved bouncing ideas off of each other over lunch.
I felt a need to get past the idea of the “woman as pioneer.” A woman didn’t have to be first to be important. I also found it helpful to put a woman’s story in a setting like advertising, which I did in my research with Craig Davis.
What was the key moment or turning point when you decided on this approach to historical research? I was meant to be a historian, but I never knew it! I love archival work. I love reading diaries. With archives, one thing leads to another, one thing leads to new sources. And before you know it, you find more leads.
How did your research inform your teaching? I never taught gender classes, but I guest taught lectures about women in the mid-twentieth century. In some ways, my research has informed my writing classes because many women are exceptional writers. And that helped them get ahead at the time. I could give examples of that in my classes.
My work with Craig Davis was mainly case studies. And giving case studies as examples works well for discussions in my PR writing classes. Like the one on vibrators! It’s a great model of guerilla marketing. I did most of the historical writing on that one. Case studies are really a different type of writing, but it’s still writing.
What advice do you have for junior faculty? One of the most important things to do is to seek good people to collaborate with who are fun to work with, but will improve the final product. My second piece of advice is to know when to declare that your research is done and to start writing. It’s so tempting to continue researching, and it’s more fun to hang out in the archive than to start writing. But you have to know when to say “enough” and decide it’s time to write.
Interview By: Bailey Dick, Ohio University
