Averill Earls

Averill Earls is a historian of sexuality and modern Ireland, and winner of a white ribbon at the Minnesota State Fair for her Honey Gingersnap Cookies. Sure, it's just third place, and it's in the honey competition, but still, not bad for a stodgy old historian.

After earning a B.A. in Political Science and an M.A. in History from the University of Vermont, Earls received her Ph.D. in History from the University at Buffalo, graduating in 2016. She started her first job as a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA, and stayed for six years. Then she landed a gig at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, a small liberal arts college known for its world-class choir (and Christmas Fest) and for being the "hometown" of Rose from the Golden Girls. She teaches courses on modern European and Irish history, gender and sexuality studies, and digital history methodology. With a face that can't lie and a very "East coast" vocabulary, Minnesotans and midwestern students find her "real interesting." The State Fair ribbon is helping, though.

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Earls is one of the four feminist historians and award-winning podcasters who founded Dig: A History Podcast in 2017. Dig averages 3,000 downloads per week and is assigned annually in over 85 different colleges. She's been interviewed about podcasting by @AskHistorians, Buffalo Boss Babes, and AtBuffalo Magazine. Want to lean how to podcast? Earls has hosted half a dozen podcasting workshops, from middle school girls and their dads to professional historians at the Organization of American Historians and American Association of State and Local History annual conferences. Maybe you're next?

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Earls writes about Ireland, sexuality, and teaching; her writing has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Historical Reflections (in the top-visited issue of the journal to date), Perspectives Magazine, Nursing Clio, and Notches Blog. In 2021 she was awarded the Judith R. Walkowitz Article Prize for her 2020 article, "Solicitor Brown and His Boy." She has two books in production: Spiritualism's Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale (co-authored with the other producers of Dig, forthcoming from Cornell University Press October 15, 2024) and Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972 (Temple University Press, due out spring 2025). She's committed to dividing her research time equally between projects that are traditionally academic and public-facing, and crossing the two streams whenever possible. She's currently working on two oral history projects; the first, currently underway, is an oral history of St. Olaf's LGBTQ+ students and student life; the second, in development, is a transnational oral history of the LGBTQ+ Irish and Irish Diaspora. Pretty cool stuff. Who doesn't love it when a plan comes together?

She's written and won several major grants for her institutions (Mercyhurst University NEH 2020; New York State Association of European Historian AHA-SHARP 2022), and prestigious grants to fund her own research, including an NEH Summer Stipend and a Gale-NACBS Digital Scholars Fellowship. She is the current web developer and Layout Editor for Nursing Clio, a host for the New Books in Irish Studies podcast, an Associate Editor for the Journal of British History, and a board member of the LGBTQ+ History Association. So, plenty busy. And she's dabbled in larger-scale design project; she's designed and implemented small-scale heritage museum exhibits for local organizations, because why not?​