Welcome to the University of Mary Washington, a public arts and sciences institution in Fredericksburg, Va., that attracts intellectually curious undergraduate and graduate students in search of rigorous academics. The university – located midway between Richmond, Va., and Washington, D.C. – provides a rich array of academic, research, internship, leadership, and recreational opportunities that not only train students for the real world but allow them to interact closely with faculty members.

University of Mary Washington

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Awarded by Pennsylvania State University to recognize graduate student teaching assistants for superior instruction in the areas of physical science and engineering, life sciences, social and behavioral sciences, and the arts and humanities.

Graduate Assistant Teaching Award, English

The Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award recognizes graduate assistants for outstanding teaching performance.  This award is jointly sponsored by the Pennsylvania State University Graduate School, through the Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award endowment, and the Office of the Vice President and Dean for Undergraduate Education.

Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award

"Only Connect": Doing Dickens, Cultural Studies, and Anti-Disciplinarity In the University Literature Classroom

Dickens at 200: Still relevant after all these years

Reading the Institution: Charlotte Bronte’s Visual Literacy and Sites/Sights of Resistance in Shirley

Obligations of Home: Colonialism, Contamination, and Revolt in Bleak House

Why the Novel (Still) Matters: Doing Student-Centered Cultural Studies in the Literature Classroom

Reading Hodge: Preserving Rural Epistemologies in Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd

Few scholars know Charles Dickens better than Associate Professor of English Eric G. Lorentzen. In teaching 19th-century British literature, he maintains that Dickens' works still have a powerful lesson today. 

"In 'Great Expectations,' Dickens questions the construction of gender identity, forcing us toward a revision of how we define masculinity, and what it takes to be a gentleman in a society that perpetuates male violence, possessiveness, and control as its distinguishing features," Dr. Lorentzen wrote in an op-ed in tribute to Dickens' 200th birthday. "In the same novel, and elsewhere in 'Oliver Twist' and 'Bleak House,' he cogently explores the pathology of domestic abuse, and the societal forces that enable violence against women."

Dr. Lorentzen has published articles in numerous professional journals, including Dickens Studies Annual, The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, Victorian Newsletter, and The Virginia Woolf Miscellany. He has presented scholarly papers at more than two dozen national and international conferences.  

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.

English Literature

Literacy and Education

Victorian Literature

British Literature Since 1800

University Teaching

Pedagogy

Novel/Fiction (British)

Is Teaching Sherlock Holmes as an Undergraduate Literature Course Too 'Elementary?'

'The Narrative of the Tombstone': Teaching English 251S — British Victorian Detective and Sensation Novel

The Victorian Psychological Novel and Memory: Wordsworthian Echoes, Freudian Anticipations

Teaching Dickens and Cultural Studies in the 21st Century

Professor of English

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