Department of English

Michael Gamer Named Global Professor

October 2, 2019

Michael Gamer, Professor of English, has been selected as a Global Professor by the British Academy. Global Professorships are given to senior scholars undertaking innovative, curiosity-driven research in the humanities and social sciences.

As a Global Professor, Gamer will research and document every performance, review, and contemporary commentary of melodrama in Britain before 1843. His project explores how melodrama’s stage effects, including pantomime and immersive soundscapes, created new theatergoing experiences for audiences and how the same techniques influenced printed genres.

At Penn, Gamer was a 2017-2018 Price Mellon Research Fellow at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, where he created a digital database of the 18th- and 19th-century playbills held by the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts and the British Library. His most recent book, Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry, was published in 2017, and he contributed the 2018’s Interacting with Print: Modes of Reading in the Age of Print Saturation. He is the recipient of several teaching awards.