Professor
Academic Degrees
Eric G. Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English, received a Ph.D. (2003) in 19th-century British literature and an M.A. (1998) in English, both from Pennsylvania State University. He also received two B.A. degrees (1992, 1988), one in English and one in communications with a concentration in media/film from Rowan University.
Dr. Lorentzen has published articles in journals such as Dickens Studies Annual, The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, Victorian Newsletter, and The Virginia Woolf Miscellany, as well as a number of scholarly anthologies. He also has presented scholarly papers at more than two dozen national and international conferences. His most recent presentations include “Doing British Literature and Popular Culture: Critical Pedagogy in the University Literature Classroom” at the “Culturing the Popular” conference at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C and “Althusserian Readings: Political Portraits in Villette and Middlemarch” at the Northeastern Modern Language Association conference in New Brunswick, N.J. While at Pennsylvania State, he became the first member of his department to win both the College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Teaching Award and the University Outstanding Teaching Award as a graduate student.
His current research explores the rise of mass literacy in 19th-century England and the ways in which pedagogical institutions often marginalized, rather than empowered, at-risk readers such as women, the working classes, and colonial subjects.