Paul Eggert
Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow
Phone: +61 2 6268 8900
Fax: +61 2 6268 8879
Email: p.eggert@adfa.edu.au
Professional Background
Paul Eggert is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow. The research fellowship runs for five years from the second half of 2009.
His two projects for the fellowship are:
(1) a monograph arguing for an English-studies approach to the interdisciplinary area, history of the book. The monograph, to be called Brought to Book, will conceptualise the approach and exemplify it via a series of case-studies; and
(2) the Harpur Critical Archive: an electronic archive and scholarly edition of the complete works of colonial poet Charles Harpur (with Elizabeth Webby)
Paul Eggert was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998 and received a personal Chair in 2001 and Centenary Medal in 2003. He chairs the Board of the AustLit database and was general editor of the Academy Editions of Australian Literature.
Prior to the commencement of the fellowship, Paul taught in the English program from the inception of UNSW’s Canberra campus at ADFA in 1986, and prior to that at La Trobe University. He read for degrees at the Universities of Sydney, Melbourne and Kent at Canterbury.
Research Interests
Paul directed the Australian Scholarly Editions Centre from 1993 to 2005. Its major project, the Academy Editions of Australian Literature series for the Australian Academy of the Humanities saw the publication of ten full-scale scholarly editions during 1996-2007. Paul also brought the Colonial Texts Series to its conclusion with its eighth volume in 2004. He has directed projects creating electronic editions and enabling electronic collaboration in humanities research. The Harpur Critical Archive project is a continuation of this trajectory and will serve as a test-bed for new ‘worksite’ designs, both in the building and presentation of literary archives. (See further ‘The Book, E-Text and the “Work-Site”’, Text Editing, Print, and the Digital World, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (London: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 63–82.)
Paul writes in the areas of print culture, editorial theories of the text and electronic textuality, the restoration of historic buildings and paintings, museology, and on D.H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad.
He is presently completing two scholarly editions, in both cases collaboratively: Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils.
Publications
Two critical editions for Cambridge University Press appeared in its Works of D. H. Lawrence series in 1990 and 1994 (The Boy in the Bush and Twilight in Italy), a co-edition (with Stanton Mellick and Patrick Morgan) of the first of the Academy Editions series (The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn by Henry Kingsley) in 1996, and also of Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms (with Elizabeth Webby), in the same series published by UQP in 2006.
Paul has also edited Editing in Australia (1990), Lawrence and Comedy (with John Worthen; Cambridge University Press, 1996) and The Editorial Gaze (with Margaret Sankey; Garland, 1998) as well as D.H. Lawrence titles for Penguin and Penguin Classics.
His latest book Securing the Past was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. For details and an excerpt see http://www.cambridge.org/978052172591
For his recent article (on museums) see http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_3_no_2/papers/
An example of Paul Eggert’s book-history approach to literary study appeared as ‘Australian Classics and the Price of Books: The Puzzle of the 1890s’, JASAL special issue The Colonial Present, ed. Gillian Whitlock, 8 (2008), 97–124 at http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/742/979
You are welcome to visit Paul’s projects’ webpage at http://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/ASEC