An associate professor in the Department of History, Dr. Ress regularly teaches courses in public history and twentieth-century US history. Her courses often include service-learning projects and hands-on learning activities.
Her research is interdisciplinary, and she has presented it at regional, national, and international conferences including those organized by the ACM Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, the National Council on Public History, the Organization of American Historians, the Pop Culture Association, the Urban History Association, and the Indiana Academy of Social Sciences.
She has published on the topics of girlhood, popular culture, public history, and urban history in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, International Public History, Information, the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, the Journal of Popular Culture, History Compass, and the Midwest Social Sciences Journal. Her book American Girls in Popular Media: A Cultural History of Preadolescent Girls, 1890-1945 (2025) explores how media portrayals of preadolescent girls helped address societal anxieties exacerbated by the depression and war, including generational conflicts, gender issues, racial tensions, and urban-rural divides.
She serves (and has served) on various committees and boards across Southern Indiana including the Historic New Harmony Advisory Committee, the Board of Trustees of the Evansville Museum of Arts, History, and Science, the board of the Vanderburgh County Historical Society, and the Lick Creek Working Group.
