The University of New South Wales

Faculty Member, Humanities

About

Born in London in 1946, Martyn Lyons took his doctorate at Oxford University. He has been a faculty member at UNSW since 1977 and was Head of the School of History 1991–1994. He has published several books and articles in two fields: French revolutionary and Napoleonic history and the history of the book in modern Europe and Australia. Some of his major books include: Le Triomphe du Livre: une histoire sociologique de la lecture dans la France du 19e siécle, Promodis, 1987; Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History (with Lucy Taksa), Oxford University Press, 1992; Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution, Palgrave, 1994; Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants, Palgrave 2001; and A History of the Book in Australia 1891–1945; A National Culture in a Colonised Market (edited with John Arnold), University of Queensland Press, 2001.

Most recent books are Post-Revolutionary Europe, 1815–56, Palgrave, 2006, Ordinary Writings: Personal Narratives. Writing Practices in 19th and early 20th Century Europe, Peter Lang, 2007, Reading Culture and Writing Practices in 19th Century France, Toronto University Press, 2008, and A History of Reading & Writing in the Western World, palgrave-Macmillan 2010.

He has held visiting positions in Paris, Cambridge, Brazil and Spain. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities and President of the Australian Historical Association. He was a founder member of the George Rudé Seminar in French History and was President of the Organising Committee of the International Congress for Historical Sciences, held at UNSW in 2005. He was awarded the Centenary Medal in 2003.