Irene Gammel

Media & Culture

DepartmentEnglish (Toronto Metropolitan University)

Areas of ExpertiseModernism; modern literature and culture; avant-garde; visual culture; life writing and auto/biography; Dada and Surrealism; New York Modern; theories of urban space; ecocriticism; curating; performance art; feminist theory; gender and sexuality theory; body theory; salon culture and theory; digital archiving; World War I; trauma narratives

https://www.torontomu.ca/english/about-us/faculty-and-staff/faculty/gammel-irene/

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 Centre, 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-acclaimedBaroness 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.

Sample of supervised ComCult projects:

2019 - Emma Dunn; Dissertation: Starving for Justice: Teen Action Heroines and the Logic of Anorexia

2017 - Madeline Davy; Major Research Paper: Fashion, Subversion, and Social Change in Modernist Salons

2016 - Victoria Hetherington; Thesis: Memory, Personal Trauma, and Social Media: Writing The Cyber-Body

2014 - Emma Doran; Dissertation: "Feeling" in Modern Dance Print Media: Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and Maud Allan

2014 - Chelsea Olsen; Major Research Paper: Gender Play: The Subversive Sexual Politics of the Stettheimer Salon, 1915-1935

2012 - Valerie Velardo; Major Research Paper: Intersections of Gender and Political Economy: Florine Stettheimer and Other Modernist Salonnières

2010 - Erin McCurdy; Major Research Paper: Fractals of art and life: the Arensberg Salon as a Cubist space

2010 - Ron Levy; Major Research Paper: Conversations that fly: the Little Review and modernist salon culture

2010 - Julian Smith; Thesis: Reunion: Duchamp, Cage and ludology

2009 - Rachel Frohlich; Major Research Paper: Threads of Jewish Identity in Salon Culture: Rahel Varnhagen and Florine Stettheimer

2009 - Petronela Serb; Thesis: Romanian documentary in transition : the role of documentary films in reshaping post-communist Romanian identity

2008 - Stephanie Yumansky; Major Research Paper: Modernist salon culture: the contributions of the Stettheimer sisters in 1920s New York

ComCult Teaching Activities

CC 8829 Modernist Lit Circles: Cultural Approaches
CC 8836 Selected Topics in Media and Culture - Exhibition, Curation, Literary Cultures
CC 8836 Selected Topics in Media and Culture - Pandemic, Modernity, and the Everyday
CC 8992 Directed Group Study: Exhibition and Curation