Irene Gammel receives prestigious Obama Fellowship this summer
This summer, Irene Gammel, English professor and executive director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre is heading to Germany as one of six chosen Obama Fellowship recipients.
This summer is set to be one for the books for Irene Gammel, English professor and executive director of the Modern Literature and Culture (MLC) Research Centre at TMU.
Gammel is one of six scholars chosen from around the globe as an Obama Fellow in 2024, a prestigious designation that will take her to Germany in June and July. There, she’ll be engaged at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and University of Germersheim.
The Obama Foundation Scholars program recognizes scholars who are effecting positive change in their communities, and Gammel, the first Canadian woman recipient of the fellowship, is set to focus on life writing and her project on lockdown diaries while there.
Irene Gammel will continue her research into life writing, including looks at both the personal and political utilities of this type of writing.
Life writing is a broad literary genre that encompasses written works that deal with a person's life or experiences. These can include biographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, personal essays, and even blogs or social media posts that detail personal experiences.
“I’m very proud of the fellowship because it represents the support of a prestigious international institution, and it associates my research with the values of Barack Obama,” says Gammel. “It’s a chance to make an impactful contribution through research and also develop research that is focused on elements of social justice and on foregrounding marginalized voices including youth.”
Diving deeper into life writing research
Both the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and University of Germersheim have an established focus on life writing scholarship, an area of expertise and research interest of Gammel’s for over two decades now. “The fellowship will allow me to take this research initiative to an international level and to forge greater international networks around it,” she says.
Irene Gammel is looking forward to exploring more of her life’s work in Germany, and meeting with scholars to form a greater network of international ties.
Gammel’s life work has been focused on putting women who have been erased from cultural history back into public discourse, and this fellowship is another pivotal opportunity to bring the achievements of women into the foreground. “Having an international platform that allows me to talk about these important issues, that are also important to TMU, is a way of shepherding and promoting ideas of social justice,” she says.
During the fellowship, Gammel will be part of a public lecture and discussion forum with Carlos Lozada, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. They will discuss life writing in political memoir, as his latest work focuses on the lives of politicians and the telling of a life’s story under public scrutiny.
Lozada and Gammel will have much to talk about, because though Gammel’s focus of late on COVID-19 lockdown diaries is personal and Lozada’s work focuses on the political, Gammel argues for a renewed critical approach to the feminist motto that the personal is political.
“As a feminist scholar, I argue that the political is concretized in the personal, allowing us to incorporate perspectives of care and empathy. Such personal storytelling can galvanize into a rich political movement, as with the #MeToo stories. Conversely, politicians' personal expressions in memoir give us insight beyond their pre-written public speeches by taking us into personal anecdotes, often unwittingly revealing what they wish to hide.”
Creating international partnerships for the future
Gammel will be collaborating with people from around the world during her fellowship, and she sees this as a rich opportunity. “I think whenever we go from one country to another and we take our research methods with us, there is a huge opportunity, not just for collaborating, but in shifting our methodologies ever so slightly by learning from researchers across borders.”
As part of her residency, Gammel will be focused on forging new relationships to further build out the MLC’s international research partners. “I want to create a strong international platform and network of research relationships,” she says. But Gammel says she is also interested in networking with students. “I want to build up exchanges as well so that we could have students join us later via MITACS fellowships, for example. There’s an opportunity for me to bring students over from Germany to further enhance the internationalization of the research program that I represent.”
The award supports TMU’s efforts to internationalize research excellence, says Provost and Vice-President, Academic Roberta Innacito-Provenzano. “Congratulations to Professor Gammel on her prestigious Obama Fellowship award, a first for TMU,” she says. “This fellowship will help amplify TMU's research efforts in the arts and humanities on the international stage. Also, its core principles of diversity and inclusion are in line with the values that TMU stands for.”
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