Act I
Meet the Historian
Stella A. Ress has spent her career demonstrating a simple premise: that girls’ lives matter to history, even when history hasn’t noticed. A historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American social and cultural life, she specializes in public history, girlhood, gender, popular culture, and the history of the family. She is also a committed public historian who believes the past belongs to everyone.
Ress is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern Indiana, where she has taught since 2014. Her first book, American Girls in Popular Media: A Cultural History of Preadolescent Girls, 1890–1945 (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025), traces how images of girlhood shaped and were shaped by the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century. Her current research extends that story into the 1970s and 1980s through an unlikely lens: the 1977 Broadway musical Annie. By reading Annie not only as a pop culture product but as a work of public history, she examines what the show reveals about how little girls engage with, preserve, and shape the American past. Drawing on cast interviews, fan mail, online forums, and trade reviews, she argues that the “legions of little girls in Mary Jane shoes” who made Annie a phenomenon were not passive consumers but historical agents in their own right.
Outside the classroom and the archive, Ress has curated museum exhibits, directed community history projects, mentored students in the field, and helped shape the profession through her work with the National Council on Public History. Whether she is writing for academic journals or local history publications, leading a History Harvest in New Harmony, or building an exhibit about Evansville’s queer past, her goal is the same: to make history matter now.
She earned her Ph.D. from Loyola University Chicago in 2014 and her B.A. from Earlham College. She lives and works in Southern Indiana.
Act II
Current Research
Current Research Project
Annie
The 1977 Broadway Musical as Public History
The Production
This project examines the 1977 Broadway musical Annie as both a pop culture product and a work of public history. It asks what the show reveals about how little girls engage with, preserve, and shape the American past, and why public historians should take popular culture productions of historical subjects seriously.
The Argument
The “legions of little girls in Mary Jane shoes” who made Annie a phenomenon were not passive consumers but historical agents in their own right. Their responses constitute a form of historical practice that reveals how marginalized audiences claim authority over popular historical narratives.
The Evidence
- Oral histories of cast members
- Memoirs and interviews of its creators
- Contemporary reviews and trade publications
- Fan mail and online forum communities
- Media and performance content analyses
Key Questions
- In what ways did a pop history product like Annie motivate girls to become historians of their own lives, of their families, and of their communities?
- What can objects-in-dialogue reveal that objects-in-archives cannot?
- What does it mean for girls of color to perform roles shaped by white cultural imagination?
- How do women retrospectively make sense of childhoods spent in professional performance?
Selected Presentations from This Research
“Little Girls, Big Impact: Broadway’s Annie and Popular History.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Meeting, 2026. | “What We Can Learn by Triangulating Public History, Popular Culture, and ‘Little Girls’: A Case Study of Broadway’s Annie.” Indiana Association of Historians Annual Conference. Bloomington, IN. 1 April 2023. | “History Unboxed: Listening to Girls’ Voices from Archives to Attics, Libraries to Living Rooms.” College of Liberal Arts Faculty Colloquium, USI, September 2025. | “Singing about ‘Tomorrow’ while Interpreting the Past: ‘Little Girls,’ Annie, and Pop History.” College of Liberal Arts Faculty Colloquium, USI, April 2023.
Act III
Select Public History Projects
Community History
USI History Harvests
Developer and manager of USI’s inaugural History Harvest at the Evansville Public Library and Second Annual History Harvest at the Working Man’s Institute, New Harmony. These community digitization events brought residents and historians together to preserve and share local history.
Hometown History Service-Learning Projects
Developer and director of ongoing partnerships between USI history courses and local history publications, producing student-researched content for a broad public audience. Projects have included “Food, Festivals, and Fun” (HIST 325: Introduction to Public History) and a local history series (HIST 307: US in Depression and War).
Exhibitions
Stonewall and Evansville’s Queer Past
Curator of “Stonewall and its Connection to Evansville’s Queer Past,” a community exhibit at the Alhambra Theater. Complemented by an invited talk co-hosted by the USI Department of History and the Vanderburgh County Historical Society.
Haynie’s Corner: Not Just a Memory
Co-curator (with Jennifer Greene) of “Haynie’s Corner: Not Just a Memory,” an exhibit at the Alhambra Theater exploring the history of one of Evansville’s most storied neighborhoods.
Archives & Collections
Dunwoody Circus Collection
Faculty Director of the Dunwoody Circus Collection at USI’s University Archives and Special Collections. This role includes research, stewardship, and public programming around one of the region’s most distinctive archival holdings, including co-presenting at the Circus Historical Society’s annual meeting in Atlanta.
Digital History
Evansville Redlining Map
Contributed the “Evansville, Indiana” entry to Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America, the Digital Scholarship Lab’s nationally recognized project documenting the legacy of discriminatory housing policy across American cities.
Act IV
Publications & Scholarship
Book
American Girls in Popular Media: A Cultural History of Preadolescent Girls, 1890–1945. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025.
Monograph ↗Peer-Reviewed Articles
Ress, Stella A. and Francesco Cafaro. “‘I Want to Experience the Past’: Lessons from a Visitor Survey on How Immersive Technologies Can Support Historic Interpretation.” Information 12, no. 1 (2021).
Ress, Stella A. “Chicago’s Marillac House: A Case Study of Diversifying Our Understanding of the Settlement House Movement in the United States, 1914–1964.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 113, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 40–66.
Ress, Stella A. “‘We Are a Happy Family’: Nineteenth Century Familial Power Dynamics.” Midwest Social Sciences Journal 22, no. 1 (Fall 2019): 139–153.
Ress, Stella A. “The Circle of Life: Reinvigorating the Humanities with Undergraduate Public History Curriculum.” International Public History 2(1), August 2019.
Ress, Stella A., Francesco Cafaro, et al. “Mapping History: Orienting Museum Visitors Across Time and Space.” ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 11, no. 3 (September 2018): 1–25.
Ress, Stella A. “Bridging the Generation Gap: Little Orphan Annie in the Great Depression.” Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 4 (August 2010): 782–800.
Ress, Stella A. “Finding the Flapper: A Historiographical Look at Image and Attitude.” History Compass 7 (November 2009): 1–11.
Select Public Writing
“Meeting the Moment in Tiers (Not Tears): A Resistance Guide for Public History Educators.” Co-Author. History@Work: The Official Blog of the National Council on History. 27 June 2025.
Public Writing“Best Practices in Public History: Certificate Programs in Public History.” Lead Author. National Council on Public History, March 2024.
Professional Report“Circus Stories: What the Circus Can Teach Us.” Maturity Journal, July 2024.
Public WritingRess, Stella A., Dan Ott, and Rachel Boyle. “The Conundrum of Capitalism and Public History.” History@Work: The NCPH Blog, 24 July 2018.
Public WritingCurtain Call
Get in Touch
Whether you are a fellow scholar, a student, a collaborator, a publisher, or simply curious about the history of American girls and popular culture, I would love to hear from you.
Phone
(812) 227-5137
Institution
Department of History | University of Southern Indiana
8600 University Blvd., Evansville, IN 47712