Emeritus Professor Paul Eggert

Paul Eggert is an editorial theorist, scholarly editor and book historian within the broad field of English literature.  A fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities since 1998, he served as the general editor of its Academy Editions of Australian Literature (10 vols, 1996-2007) and as chair of its English-discipline section (2009-11). He received the Centenary Medal for services to the study of literature in 2003 and, later, various awards from the Association for Documentary Editing (USA, 2005), the Society for Textual Scholarship (USA, 2011 and 2017) and, in 2022, a lifetime achievement award from the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America.

Paul joined UNSW Canberra as a lecturer in English in 1985, rose through the ranks to professor, served as head of school 2001-03 and was founding director of the Australian Scholarly Editions Centre 1993–2005.

During 2009-14 he worked as an ARC professorial research fellow at UNSW Canberra and then completed his professional career with several years as the Martin J. Svaglic chair in textual studies at Loyola University Chicago. The two principal outcomes were the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (2019, and ongoing at www.charles-harpur.org), and a work of editorial theory, The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editions and Book History (Cambridge UP, 2019). Eggert was made Professor Emeritus at Loyola upon retiring there at the end of 2018.

The book for which Eggert is most widely known is Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature, published by Cambridge UP in 2009; it won the Society for Textual Scholarship’s Finneran Award as the best book of editorial theory for 2009–10. Paul went on to serve as president of this US-based society during 2013-14.

Three books of his appeared in 2013: a scholarly edition of the original newspaper versions of Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils (Sydney UP); a scholarly edition of Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad, co-edited with Roger Osborne (Cambridge UP in its Works of Joseph Conrad series), and Biography of a Book, a study of the life of Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils (Pennsylvania State UP and Sydney UP).

Several other full-scale scholarly editions of works by D. H. Lawrence, Henry Kingsley and Rolf Boldrewood have also appeared since 1990. 

The Letters of Charles Harpur and his Circle, selected and edited by Paul Eggert and Chris Vening is forthcoming in 2023 (Sydney UP).

His email address is p.eggert@adfa.edu.au