Irene Gammel
(Toronto Metropolitan University)
with Carlos Lozada (The New York Times)
Go-To Lines: Reading Political Life Writing in America
July 8, 2024, 15:10pm, N.206 (Campus Germersheim)
This event features Irene Gammel and Carlos Lozada discussing the role of life writing in political memoir and beyond. They delve into how these narratives address politicians’ lives under public scrutiny, particularly in the context of the Trump era, which has inspired a wave of books exploring personal and political identities and the shifts caused by the Trump era. Lozada focuses on the political aspects, while Gammel advocates for a feminist reevaluation of life writing, highlighting how personal narratives can embody political values such as care and empathy. They explore how personal stories, like those of #MeToo, can fuel resistance movements and how life writing narratives of public persons can reveal unexpected insights beyond their public personas.
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.
You can download the poster for the event here.
