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.
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 on January 1st 2019. The editorial expression of the project is following in book (print and PDF) form from Sydney University Press: see below.
Professional Employment
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.
Publications/Research Listings
How D. H. Lawrence Wrote: Performance on the Page, forthcoming. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
The Letters of Charles Harpur and his Circle: The Supplementary Letters. Edited by Paul Eggert and Chris Vening. forthcoming Canberra: Charles Harpur Critical Archive, 2025.
The Letters of Charles Harpur and his Circle. Selected and edited by Paul Eggert and Chris Vening. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2023.
The Prose of Charles Harpur. Selected and edited by Paul Eggert and Chris Vening. Under contract to Sydney University Press.
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’sWhile 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 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 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, with a final summation in "The Beautiful Book", script and print in 2022.
He has a chapter on the late colonial novel in The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel (2022) and another, "The Many-Voiced Charles Harper" in The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry (2025).
Awards
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.
