Jørgen Lorentzen

Jørgen Lorentzen (born 4 November 1956) is a Norwegian literary scholar and independent film producer. His research has focused on the representation of men and masculinities in literature, film and popular culture. He became known to a broad audience through his participation in the TV program Hjernevask in 2010. He was employed as a researcher at the Centre for Gender Research in Oslo until 2013, and has since been a freelance researcher and documentary film producer. Lorentzen studied literature and worked as a journalist and editor at a publishing company during his early career. In 1997 he earned a doctoral degree in literature with the dissertation Mannlighetens muligheter on male characters in the works of Knut Hamsun, August Strindberg and Arne Garborg. He was an acting lecturer in literature at the Department of Nordic Studies and Literature at the University of Oslo from 1994 to 1995, an acting associate professor at the department from 1997 to 1998 and a researcher at the department from 1999 to 2000 on a short-term project on the literature of Herman Bang. From 2002 to 2013 he was a postdoctoral researcher, researcher and briefly (2006–2007) an acting associate professor at the university's Centre for Women's and Gender Studies (later the Centre for Gender Research), primarily working on two externally funded projects on the cultural history of fatherhood in Norway since 1850 and on "public intimacies", the latter a collaboration with media studies scholar and queer theorist Wencke Mühleisen. Lorentzen was most recently employed as a researcher and left the university in 2013 when his externally funded project had concluded. In addition to his doctoral dissertation, Lorentzen has published several articles and book chapters on fathers in Norwegian history and literary history. The article "Ibsen and Fatherhood" (New Literary History, 2006) addresses father figures in Henrik Ibsen's works. The theoretical article "Masculinities and the Phenomenology of Men's Orgasms" (Men and Masculinities, 2007), his most cited work, argues for a new male sexual ethics based on "the penis as a bridge from me to you". The article was critiqued by biologists in 2010. Lorentzen has also written several popular science books in his fields, including Maskulinitet: blikk på mannen gjennom litteratur og film on the representation of masculinity in literature and film. As of 2021, Lorentzen's works were cited around 400 times according to Google Scholar.