Paul Salzman

Biography

Paul Salzman was born in Melbourne in 1953. He undertook an honours degree in English at Monash University, graduating in 1975. He then did a PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge, completing in 1979, after which he took up a postdoctoral fellowship at Adelaide University. At that stage of his career his main area of research was early modern prose fiction, and he published a major study of the field and two editions of Oxford World’s Classics. He tutored at the University of Melbourne for three years before taking up a position at La Trobe University, leaving as Professor Emeritus in 2017. He has also been a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, Merton College, Oxford, Clare Hall College, Cambridge, Oxford Brookes University, and has held a British Council visiting fellowship at Birkbeck College, University of London. At La Trobe he collaborated with Ken Gelder to produce two studies of Australian fiction. At the same time, Salzman’s work on early modern literature expanded to include women’s writing, which led to an edition of Aphra Behn’s fiction and poetry. His interest in literary history is manifested in the study of a single early modern year (1621). Current projects include an on-line edition of Mary Wroth’s poetry together with a contextual biography, and a study of literature and politics in the 1620s.