Patty Argyrides

Patty Argyrides is a Faculty of Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century English, Irish, and American literature, and dance. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work is also informed by her experiential knowledge of dance as a professionally-trained ballet dancer.

Her dissertation, “Embodying Modernism: The Ballets Russes and Modernist Literature,” examined the performativity of language and gesture in modern narrative form in the texts of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, W.B. Yeats, and Virginia Woolf, and the ballets created by the Ballets Russes. A revised manuscript of this thesis is in preparation to be submitted for publication.

As a Postdoctoral Fellow, she will be developing her next project, which studies the reciprocal relationship between modern and contemporary American literature and dance.

Her research has been published or is forthcoming in Modernist Cultures, Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Drama, and Modern Fiction Studies.

List of Publications

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles:

• “‘Secretly Proustian:’ Les Biches, Mrs Dalloway, and In Search of Lost Time.” Modern Fiction Studies, 71.3, Fall 2025. In Press.
• “The Astonishing Lives of the Ballets Russes in J.M. Barrie’s The Truth about the Russian Dancers.” Modern Drama. 68.3, Fall 2025. In Press.
• “Hauntingly Beautiful: Virginia Woolf, Embodied Reading, and Woolf Works.” Journal of Modern Literature. 46.4, Summer 2023. 
• “Choreopiscopally’: James Joyce’s ‘Nausicaa’ and Vaslav Nijinsky’s The Afternoon of a Faun.” Modernist Cultures. 17.1, February 2022.

Book Reviews, Web-Based, and Public-Facing Articles:

• Rev. La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern by Lynn Garafola. Feminist Modernist Studies. 5.3, Fall 2022. 
• “Reading Choreography, Choreographed Reading.” ASAP/J. 8 December 2020. 
• “Movement Literacy.” Co-authored with Meindert Peters. Modernism/modernity PrintPlus, 5.2. 31 August 2020. https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/movement-literacy
• “Embodying Nijinsky: Dancing History and Myth at the National Ballet of Canada.” The Dance Current 20.6. November/December 2017.