The Gift of Time

Trustees’ Research Scholar 2002-2005

Lorraine de Montluzin was in the inaugural class of Trustees’ Research Scholars appointed at Francis Marion University, the honor being afforded to her and Dr. Fred David of the School of Business for the 2002-03 academic year.

De Montluzin appreciated the recognition and the monetary award that accompanied it, but her favorite aspect of the award was the time it afforded for research.

“For me, the greater benefit was time — more time to devote to my second academic pleasure after teaching, scholarly research in my field of 18th-19th-century English press history,” says de Montluzin. “The reduction in course load of one course each semester gave me the uninterrupted blocks of time that all of us engaged in scholarship and publication know is vital for researching, thinking, and writing.”

De Montluzin, a dedicated scholar since her collegiate days at Tulane and Duke universities, has made a lifetime of studying, and cataloging the authorship of entries in The Gentleman’s Magazine, a landmark journal published in England from the late-17th through the early 20th century. Articles and other items in The Gentleman’s Magazine were penned by prominent writers and national leaders, but the identity of the authors was not always clear. De Montluzin’s pioneering and painstaking scholarship identified and confirmed their identities, creating a valuable database for researchers across the centuries.

She published her most famous work, Attributions of Authorship in The Gentleman’s Magazine 1731-1868: An Electronic Union List (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2003), during her tenure as a Trustees’ Research Scholar. It is a publication that lives on. De Montluzin continues to study and add to the

database to this day.

“It is vital for researchers to know the authors of primary source material that they are using,” de Montluzin explains, “and this database brings together 25,585 authorial attributions of anonymous, pseudonymous, and incompletely signed articles, letters, poems, book reviews, obituaries, etc., in 18th-19th-century England’s greatest magazine, material important for researchers engaged in political and social history, literature, medicine, science, theology, and a host of other specialties.”

The database integrated three other electronic databases that de Montluzin created earlier in her career.

In addition to her work with Attributions and Authorship, de Montluzin says that the extra research time afforded by the course reduction enabled her to complete nine articles or notes published in scholarly journals in the United States and Great Britain and to make progress in preparing two additional articles for publication.

De Montluzin remains an active researcher, typically publishing articles every year and constantly adding to her database. More recently, she has returned to the classroom. She taught one upper division course at FMU this year.

“It’s a joy to be teaching again!” she says.