People
Peter Mortensen
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Peter Mortensen is Associate Professor
of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an Associate
Provost Fellow.
Contact Information
215 English Building | MC-718
217-333-7014
pmortens@illinois.edu
Webpage: http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/pmortens/www
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 two book-length projects: Manufacturing Illiteracy in the United States, a single-authored study of the materiality and politics of literacy in the U.S., 1880-1930, and A Hard Year Downstate, a group ethnography of public discourse on race and diversity that entails critical analysis of the campus’ year-long Brown v. Board of Education Jubilee Commemoration.
Biographical Statement
From 1999 to 2006, Mortensen directed the Freshman Rhetoric and Academic Writing Programs at Illinois, which together offer most of the courses students take to satisfy the campus’ first-year composition requirement. Also, he is co-director of the Ethnography of the University (EOTU), a cross-campus initiative that through sponsored courses and special projects promotes students’ ethnographic research on the university. From 2004 to 2006, EOTU collaborated with the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society in research on race and diversity at the university.
Mortensen co-chairs the Illinois Articulation Initiative’s General Education Communication Panel and is a member of the IAI Steering Panel. In the profession, he sits 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 is currently serving a 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.