Programs

Graduate Programme in Communication & Culture
A Partnership of Ryerson University and York University

Irene Gammel

Area of Concentration:   Media & Culture
University:   Ryerson University
E-Mail Address:   gammel@ryerson.ca
Website:   www.ryerson.ca/mlc

Education

Ph.D. English (McMaster University); M.A. English (McMaster University); Staatsexamen (MA Equivalent), English, French (Universität des Saarlandes, Germany).

Biography

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 Culture Multi-Media Centre, which is dedicated to the preservation and study of early twentieth-century modern texts and artifacts. She is the author and editor of eight 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.

“Modern 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 several world cities including New York, Paris, and London with a focus on New York Dada, the Left Bank Moderns, and Bloomsbury. The course explores a range of cultural expressions including print culture, visual culture and performance.

Irene 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). For more detail, see Irene Gammel’s webpage: www.ryerson.ca/mlc

Research Interest

Early female avant-garde performance and body art, in particular the work of the Dada artist Baroness Elsa; Fashion and body image in the writings of Canadian icon L.M. Montgomery; Modernist biographies and autobiographies; Women’s everyday cultures of the modern era.

Selected Publications

• Ed., trans. Mein Mund ist lüstern / I Got Lusting Palate: Dada Verse von Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Berlin: Ebersbach, 2005.
• Ed. The Intimate Life of L.M.Montgomery. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
• 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.
• 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. Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.
• Ed. (with Elizabeth Epperly) L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
• Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1994.