Irene Gammel is a literary historian, biographer and curator. She is a professor of English and holds the Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Culture at Ryerson University. Gammel is the Director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre at Ryerson and has served on the executive boards of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, the journal Canadian Literature, and the L.M. Montgomery Institute. Her research focuses on Modern feminist performance art, Canadian and American literature, and European avant-garde movements, such as Dada and Surrealism.
She holds a PhD (1992) and MA (1987) in English from McMaster University, and a Staatsexamen's degree from the Universität des Saarlandes in Germany. She has acted as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Department of English at the University of Toronto (Spring 2004), a visiting professor at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and Erfurt Universität in Germany (Spring 2001), and has taught at the University of Prince Edward Island. Gammel was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2009.