About

Honors:

• Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998.
• Founding General Editor of its Academy Editions of Australian Literature series (10 vols, 1996–2007).
• Chair of its English section (2009–11).
• Centenary Medal of the Commonwealth of Australia for services to the study of literature in 2003.

Offices held:

• President of the Society for Textual Scholarship during 2013–14
• President of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand 2003–06,
• Sat on the board of the bibliographic database of Australian literature AustLit over many years, and was active in securing recognition and funding in Australia for the digital humanities.
• An evaluator of research-grant proposals for government bodies in Australia, Belgium, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa
• Reader of book proposals for university presses including Cambridge (UK), PennState and Sydney
• Referee of article submissions for a dozen scholarly journals.

Degrees

• BA (Sydney)
• MA (Melbourne)
• PhD (Kent at Canterbury) 
  • Five years teaching at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
  • Thirty years at the University of New South Wales, Canberra.There he served as founding director of the Australian Scholarly Editions Centre (1993–2005), as head of the English department (2001–03) and, for his last five years until the end of 2014, was an Australian Research Council professorial fellow.

Program Areas

• Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British and Australian Literature
• Textual Studies
• Editorial Theory
• Scholarly Editing of Literary Works
• Analytical Bibliography
• History of the Book
• Print Culture

In 2017 Dr. Eggert taught the graduate courses Textual Studies Sring semester) and From Hardy to Lawrence: Studying Versions (Fall).

Research Interests

• Theories of the Literary Work, Text and Document
• Scholarly Editing in its Print and Digital Forms
• D. H Lawrence and Joseph Conrad. 
• Current research project: the Charles Harpur Critical Archive, examining the works of this Romantic-era poet of colonial New South Wales. Publication of the archival expression of the project occurred in October 2018. The editorial expression will follow.

Selected Publications

• Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2009); it won the Society for Textual Scholarship’s Finneran Award for 2009–10.
• Biography of a Book: Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils (Pennsylvania State UP, 2013, and Sydney UP, 2013)
•  Full-scale scholarly editions of (1) Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad, co-edited with Roger Osborne (Cambridge UP, 2013 in the Works of Joseph Conrad series) and (2) the original newspaper versions of Henry Lawson’s short stories While the Billy Boils (Sydney UP, 2013).
• Several other full-scale scholarly editions of works by D. H. Lawrence, Henry Kingsley and Rolf Boldrewood have appeared under Paul’s hand since 1990. He has also edited several collections of essays (on D. H. Lawrence, book history and editorial theory), and has written many journal articles and book chapters.
• An essay available online is Paul’s 2013 presidential address to the Society for Textual Scholarship entitled “The Hand of the Present,” in Textual Cultures.
• Another is his D. F. McKenzie lecture, “Brought to Book: Book History and the Idea of Literature,” delivered at the University of Oxford, England and published in The Library. 
• Finally, an article about what the printed (analogue) scholarly edition has to teach the digital, and vice versa, appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities in 2016.