People
Peter Mortensen
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Peter Mortensen is Associate Professor of English and Associate Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Contact Information
207 Swanlund Administration Building | MC-304
217-333-7014
pmortens@illinois.edu
Webpage: http://www.provost.illinois.edu/about/staff/mortensen/
Research Interests
Mortensen's research interests include the history of rhetoric and literacy in the United States and the ethnographic study of literacy in institutions.
Publications
He is author of Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States (with Janet Carey Eldred, 2002), editor of Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century (with Beth Daniell, 2007) and Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy (with Gesa E. Kirsch, 1996), and author or co-author of essays appearing in College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, Written Communication, and various edited volumes. (With Kirsch, he won the 1993 Braddock Award for Best Article in CCC.) Mortensen is currently completing Manufacturing Illiteracy in the United States, a study of the materiality and politics of literacy in the U.S., 1880-1930.
Biographical Statement
From 1999 to 2006, Mortensen directed the Freshman Rhetoric Program and Academic Writing Program at Illinois, which together offer most of the courses students take to satisfy the campus’ first-year composition requirement. Also, from 2003 to 2006, he was a co-director of the Ethnography of the University Initiative, a cross-campus initiative that through sponsored courses and special projects promotes students’ ethnographic research on the university. From 2004 to 2006, EUI collaborated with the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society in research on race and diversity at the university.
Until recently, Mortensen co-chaired the Illinois Articulation Initiative’s General Education Communication Panel and was a member of the IAI Steering Panel. In the profession, he completed two terms on the editorial board of College Composition and Communication and served on the ad hoc Conference on College Composition and Communication committee that drafted Guidelines for the Ethical Conduct of Research in Composition Studies. He just completed a five-year term on the executive committee of the MLA Division on the History and Theory of Rhetoric and Composition.
Mortensen has been at Illinois since 1999. Prior to that, he spent a decade on the English faculty at the University of Kentucky, where he was affiliated with the Center on Social Theory. In 1989, he earned a Ph.D. in English and American Literature (with special emphasis in composition theory and research) from the University of California, San Diego.