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Irene Gammel

Dr. Irene Gammel

Professor; Director, Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre
DepartmentEnglish
EducationPhD (McMaster)
Memberships/ServicesFellow, Royal Society of Canada, Chair, Local Organizing Committee for the Modernist Studies Association annual conference (MSA Toronto 2019), Editorial Board Member, Avant-Garde Studies, Editorial Board Member, Fashion Studies, Advisory Board Member, Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde Advisory, Board Member, L. M. Montgomery Research Group, Editorial Board Member, L. M. Montgomery Institute International Advisory Committee
Areas of ExpertiseModern literature and visual culture; fashion and the body, avant-garde women; performance of the self in public; multimodal art-making; trauma narratives and memory; recovery of women’s marginalized stories

Biography:

Since coming to Toronto Metropolitan University in 2005, Dr. Irene Gammel has held positions as professor of English, Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Culture (2005; renewed 2011), and director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre. She is the author and editor of fourteen books, including the internationally acclaimed Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity (MIT Press) and Looking for Anne of Green Gables (St. Martin’s Press), as well as over 50 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. Irene Gammel is well-known for her scholarship on gender and modernism. Her research has helped uncover the earliest roots of modern and feminist performance art, contributed to the consolidation of L.M. Montgomery Studies as an academic field, and claimed women's confessional discourses as a sub-discipline of autobiographical studies. As the Director of the Modern Literature and Culture (MLC) Research Centre, she has hosted and curated numerous exhibitions, symposia, and workshops; her passion is training students at all levels through experiential methods. 

Selected Books:

Ed. (with Suzanne Zelazo). Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism. Toronto: Book*hug, 2019.

Ed. (with Suzanne Zelazo). Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

Ed. (with Suzanne Zelazo). Crystal Flowers: Poetry and a Libretto by Florine Stettheimer. Toronto: BookThug, 2010.

Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of Lucy Maud Montgomery and Her Literary Classic.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008.

Ed. The Intimate Life of L. M. Montgomery. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Ed. and trans. Mein Mund ist lüstern / I Got Lusting Palate : Dada Verse von Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Berlin: Ebersbach, March 2005.

Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity - A Cultural Biography. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002.

Ed.  Making Avonlea: L. M. Montgomery and Popular Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto  Press, 2002.  

Ed. Confessional Politics: Women's Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.

Ed. (with E. Epperly). L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Selected Articles:

“Avantgarde Play: Building Radical Community through Dada Games.” Modernist Communities Across Cultures and Media. Ed. Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson. Gainesville, FL: Florida University Press, 2019. 46-67.    

“Not a Common Shop-Girl: Sister Carrie, Fashion and the Working Woman in American Realism.” “Working” Women: New Essays in American Realisms, ed. Miriam S. Gogol. Lanham, ML: Roman and Littlefield/Lexington Books, 2018. 13-43.   

“In Flanders Fields: Rhetoric, Community, and the Making of an Iconic War Poem.” First World War Studies (2018): 1-18.  

(with Karen Mulhallen). “Dressing the Twentieth Century in Literature.” A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Modern Age. Ed. Alexandra Palmer. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 191-210, notes, 231-33.  

“Mapping Patriotic Memory: L. M. Montgomery, Mary Riter Hamilton and the Great War.” L. M. Montgomery and War. Ed. Andrea McKenzie and Jane Ledwell. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. 56-77.

“Art, mode et modernisme: conception d'une subjectivité radicale et performance du corps” [Art, Fashion, and Modernism: Performing the Artist’s Body, Fashioning Radical Selves]. Fictions modernistes du masculin/féminin : 1900-1940. Ed. Andrea Oberhuber, Alexandra Arvisais et Marie-Claude Dugas. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes (PUR), 2016. 63-83.

(with Benjamin Lefebvre). “Editing in Canada: The Case of L.M. Montgomery.” Editing as a Cultural Practice. Ed. Dean Irvine and Smaro Kamboureli. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016. 75-92.

“Memory of St. Julien: Configuring Gas Warfare in Mary Riter Hamilton’s Battlefield Art.” Journal of War and Culture Studies (2016): 1-22.

(with Cathy Waszczuk). “‘A Rare Moment of Crisis’: Modernist Intellectual Currents in Europe.” The Modernist World. Ed. Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross. London: Routledge, 2015. 301-310.

“Dada Fantasia: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in New York.” Die Dada: Wie Frauen Dada prägten. Ed. Ina Boesch. Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, 2015. 97-106.