Writing a New History

Anne Ruggles Gere '66 teaches at a sprawling Big Ten university with 36,000 students, but her undergraduate experience at Colby helped develop an affection for small, liberal arts colleges.
Gere, who is a full professor at the University of Michigan and chair of a joint doctoral program in English and education, said, "I have the greatest fondness for Colby. The education I got there laid the foundation for my advanced degrees."
Ticking off a list of Colby faculty legends--Mark Benbow, Peter Westervelt, Alfred "Chappie" Chapman, Pat Brancaccio among them--Gere said, "They really were impressive teachers and very good scholars. For what I needed as an undergraduate, these people were perfect."
"I still remember questions that Benbow asked," Gere said. She described a recurrent sensation of hearing his voice in her head when she's teaching a close reading of Shakespeare and asks students, "And what strikes you about this line?"
Studying literature with professor Alice Comparetti was particularly important to Gere, who later realized what a role model Comparetti had been. "I knew she had a family life and a career, too," said Gere, who is married to Brewster Gere, a Presbyterian minister. Their son and a daughter are in undergraduate and graduate programs, respectively.
After graduating from Colby, Gere, now a Colby overseer, earned a master's degree at Colgate University and taught English at Princeton High School for three years before going to Michigan for a Ph.D. in the English and education program she now directs. She taught at Michigan for several years, then moved to the University of Washington in Seattle before returning to Michigan in 1987.
Last winter Gere returned to Colby to present a workshop for the College's Writing Across the Curriculum program to encourage faculty members to incorporate writing into their classes.
Her scholarly research on writing and the teaching of writing reflects her undergraduate, generalist education, with an increasing emphasis on history. A book she wrote in 1987 was titled Writing Groups: History, Theory and Implications. "We have in this culture a stereotypical notion of writers who sit in their garret and don't talk to anyone," she said. Her goal is to debunk that myth to help convey to students the importance of talking over ideas and sharing drafts. Writing groups in America are not just a phenomenon of the 1960s, she said; in her work she traced them to colonial times.
Another book, Intimate Practices: Literary and Cultural Work in U.S. Women's Clubs, 1880-1920, is slated for publication in March. Noting that academic English departments did not exist until the 1870s, Gere said, "Women's clubs had the corner on the literature market." To regain control of literature, educators had to belittle the women's clubs. "They had to make English as hard as Greek to justify it in the academy," she said.
A National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study writing as a way of learning in college and secondary schools funded her research on writing groups, and she is seeking another NEH grant for a project on re-thinking the teaching of American literature.