Background

Irene Gammel was born on July 14, 1959, in Canada.

Education

Irene Gammel studied at McMaster University, where she got a Master of Arts in 1988 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1992. Then she attended Universitat des Saarlandes in Germany in 1987. Irene was a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) visiting student at Queen's University. Also, she was educated at the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, where she studied auditory libre (comparative literature).

Career

After graduating, Irene Gammel served as a lecturer in English and comparative literature at the McMaster University in 1992-1993. In 1993 she worked as an assistant professor at the University of Prince Edward Island. In 1997 Irene became an associate professor, and, in 2000, she started to work as a professor. Since 2005, Irene worked at the Ryerson University. In 2005-2018 she held the position of Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Culture and a professor of English. Irene Gammel was a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto in 2004, and a visiting professor at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and Erfurt Universität, Germany in 2001.

Specializing in the literature and culture of the modern era from 1900 to 1930, Irene Gammel is a professor of English who also speaks and reads German, French, and intermediate Latin. She often writes about women in literature and art from a feminist point of view. Irene's first book, Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove, came from her doctoral dissertation in English literature. Irene points out in the book that her primary purpose is "to provide a revisionary, gender-critical, reading of twentieth-century American and Canadian naturalism."

Irene Gammel is also the author of Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity: A Cultural Biography. The work represents the first full biography of a woman whose outrageous lifestyle ultimately over-shadowed her efforts as a poet, sculptor, and painter. She provides readers with a look at Baroness Elsa's humble beginnings as Else-Hildegard Plötz, the German daughter of a harsh middle-class father and a mother who went insane. The baroness ran away from her small hometown in the Baltic to Berlin, where she survived primarily off the largesse of her various lovers. Baroness Elsa eventually ended up in America with her second husband, who left her. She then married German Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven, who later committed suicide and left his wife with only a title and no money.

Living in New York, the baroness became part of the dada art scene. The name dada comes from a French word meaning "hobbyhorse." Dada art usually contains non-traditional forms and is produced using unconventional methods. It uses everyday objects like bicycles and urinals and often reflects the cynicism of the period following World War I. The central theme is that there is no purpose and no meaning to art or life. The baroness's art included portraits and sculptures made from everyday materials, as well as costumes. Irene Gammel points out that the baroness, who once shaved her head and painted it red, became one of the first practitioners of body art. Her experimental poetry features odd syntax and phonetic sounds. The baroness, however, was never able to support herself financially. She also alienated many people with her anti-Semitism and homophobia, although she was bisexual herself. In the end, she returned to Europe and died destitute in Paris in 1926 from gas poisoning. No one is sure whether it was deliberate or accidental.

Irene currently served as a Director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Center at Ryerson University beginning in 2006. Also, she keeps writing.

Achievements

• Irene Gammel is known as an educator and writer. She is the director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre. As a writer, Irene is currently the author and editor of ten books, including the internationally-acclaimed Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity: A Cultural Biography. Irene Gammel also is well-known for her scholarship on gender and modernism.
  
  Besides, Irene Gammel is an SSHRC (The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) Research Grant Holder in 1994-1995, 1997-2000, 2000-2003, and 2003-2006. In 1995 and 2002, she got Awards for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement from the University of Prince Edward Island. Also, she is a holder of the Government of Canada (World University Service of Canada) Award, 1989-1991.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Looking For Anne

    (Looking for Anne is the untold story of a literary classi...)

    2008
  • Making Avonlea

    (Making Avonlea, the first study to focus on Montgomery an...)

    2002
  • Confessional Politics

    (Confessional Politics investigates the creative and strat...)

    1999
  • Baroness Elsa

    (In Baroness Elsa, Irene Gammel traces the extraordinary l...)

    2002
  • Anne's World

    (The original essays in Anne's World offer fresh and timel...)

    2010
  • L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture

    (The wide range of contributors represents views from acro...)

    1999
  • Crystal Flowers

    (This new volume offers formerly unpublished material cull...)

    2010
  • The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery

    (The eleven essays illuminate Montgomery's personal writin...)

    2005
  • Sexualizing Power in Naturalism

    (Sexualizing Power In Naturalism sheds light on the functi...)

    1994
  • Body Sweats

    (The Baroness's biographer Irene Gammel and co-editor Suza...)

    2011
  • Die Dada Baroness 2003

Views

Irene Gammel's research on gender, identity, and modernism 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.

Membership

• 

  Irene Gammel was the president of a Canadian Comparative Literature Association in 1992-1993.

  Canadian Comparative Literature Association , Canada

References

• Irene Gammel (@MLC_Research) - Twitter
• mlc_research - Instagram
• Irene Gammel - LinkedIn