Provost's Staff

Peter Mortensen
Associate Provost Fellow

204 Swanlund Administration Building
601 E. John Street
Champaign, IL  61820
Phone: (217) 333-7157
Fax: (217) 244-5639
pmortens@illinois.edu

Assistant: Phyllis Tate, (217) 333-7157

Peter Mortensen is an Associate Provost Fellow and Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is Director of Rhetoric and a core faculty member in the Center for Writing Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in English and American Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Mortensen’s historical studies of literacy and rhetoric ask how literacy figures into judgments of value about individuals and social groups. He is author of Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States (with Janet Carey Eldred, 2002), and editor of Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century (with Beth Daniell, in press) and Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy (with Gesa E. Kirsch, 1996). At Illinois, he has taught an array of undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on literacy, rhetoric, and writing, and has been named multiple times to the campus Incomplete List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent. In recent years, Mortensen has pursued interdisciplinary efforts to involve Illinois undergraduates in the campus’ research mission, including the Ethnography of the University cross-campus initiative, which he leads with its founding director, Nancy Abelmann. Mortensen’s recent service assignments have included chairing the campus Living and Learning Communities Advisory Committee and membership on the Chancellor’s Enhancing the Undergraduate Experience Task Force. He also co-chairs the Illinois Articulation Initiative’s statewide panel on general education communication coursework. Last year, he received the English Department’s Robert Schneider Award for Outstanding Teaching and Service. Long active in the Modern Language Association, Mortensen was recently elected to the executive committee of its Division on the History and Theory of Composition and Rhetoric. He is also active in the Conference on College Composition and Communication; he serves on the editorial board of the organization’s scholarly journal and chairs its Task Force on the Multiple Uses of Writing.