Michael Gamer, professor of English in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, has been selected as a Global Professor by the British Academy, which comes with a prize of £749,100 (approximately $920,000). 

Global Professorships are given to senior scholars undertaking innovative, curiosity-driven research in the humanities and social sciences.

Global Professorships are four-year grants for research in the UK and require a British host university to act as sponsor; Dr. Gamer’s sponsor will be the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. While there, Dr. Gamer will research and document every performance, review and contemporary commentary of melodrama in Britain before 1843. His project will explore 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, Dr. 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 also contributed to Interacting with Print: Modes of Reading in the Age of Print Saturation. He is the recipient of several teaching awards.

Paul K. Saint-Amour, the Walter H. and Leonore C.  Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and professor and chair of the English department, noted that “Michael will be on leave from Penn for all four years—from January 2020 through December 2023. It’s very unusual for Penn faculty to be away for so many consecutive years; that Michael was given the green light to do so is a testament to the importance of this grant and to his value to the University as teacher, scholar and citizen.”