Department of English

Irene Gammel
Professor
PhD, McMaster University

Office: JOR 528
Phone: 416-979-5000 ext 6588
E-mail: gammel@ryerson.ca
website: www.ryerson.ca/mlc/

Dr. Irene Gammel is Professor of English and holds the Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Culture and at Ryerson University, Toronto. She is also the director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Center , which is dedicated to the study and preservation of early twentieth-century modern texts and artifacts. She is the author and editor of ten books, including the internationally-acclaimed Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity: A Cultural Biography (2002). 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.

Dr. Gammel’s teaching interests include representations of sexuality and the body, modernism, avant-garde movements such as Surrealism and Dada, modern American and Canadian literature, the city and technology, autobiography and biography, print culture, visual culture, and performance. "Modernist Literary Circles: A Cultural Approach," the graduate course Irene Gammel is contributing to the Communication and Culture programme, studies the culture of the early twentieth-century modernist salons in New York, Paris, and London.

Dr. Gammel has served as president of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, editorial board member of Canadian Literature, co-chair of the L. M. Montgomery Institute, vice-president of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, and director of Women's Studies at UPEI. She has also served as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Department of English at the University of Toronto (Spring 2004), as well as visiting professor at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and Erfurt Universität in Germany (Spring 2001). In 2009, she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Selected Publications

• Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (with Suzanne Zelazo). Cambridge and London: MIT Press, October 2011.
• Anne’s World: A New Century of Anne of Green Gables (with Benjamin Lefebvre). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 
• Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic. [http://www.keyporter.com/lookingforanne/preview.html]  Toronto: Key Porter; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008.
• Die Dada Baroness: Das wilde Leben der Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Berlin: Ebersbach, 2003. 
• Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity. A Cultural Biography. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2002.
• Confessional Politics: Women’s Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.
• Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1994