Paul Eggert

Biography

Paul Eggert is a theorist of the editorial act, a scholarly editor and a book historian within the broad field of English literature. He is Professor Emeritus at Loyola University Chicago, where he previously held the Svaglic Chair in Textual Studies. He is also Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales Canberra, where he taught and researched for many years before going to Chicago.

He has edited critical editions of works by D. H. Lawrence, Henry Kingsley, Rolf Boldrewood, Henry Lawson and Joseph Conrad. His principal ideas are brought together in the Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Biography of a Book (Pennsylvania State University Press and Sydney University Press, 2013). He has also been experimenting with digital forms of scholarly editing since the late 1990s. The most recent and technically innovative of these projects is the Charles Harpur Critical Archive.

The book for which Paul Eggert is best known is Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature, published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. It won the Society for Textual Scholarship’s Finneran Award as the best book of editorial theory for 200910. Paul went on to serve as president of this US-based society during 2013-14.

Paul also served as general editor of the Academy Editions of Australian Literature, a project of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (10 vols, 19962007) and was Head of Section for its English Section during 200911. He received the Centenary Medal for services to the study of literature in 2003.