 |
Martyn Lyons FAHA (born 1946) is emeritus professor of history and European studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. [1] He is a specialist in the history of the book, Australian history and French history.
|
Martyn Lyons FAHA (born 1946) is emeritus professor of history and European studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. [1] He is a specialist in the history of the book, Australian history and French history.
Martyn Andrew Lyons was born in Westminster, the eldest of five siblings. His father, Edward Lyons (b. Leeds, 1920), of Polish Jewish ancestry, was an ophthalmologist who set up the first eye clinic at H.M. Stanley hospital in St. Asaph, Flintshire. His mother, Marian Spence (b. Elland, 1922), of Anglo-Scottish descent, was a nurse who became the first woman to be a Leader of a County Council (Clwyd) in the United Kingdom.
Lyons spent his infancy with his mother’s relatives in Lancashire until 1950, when his father returned from active service in the Middle East, where he was a major in the medical corps. After his father was appointed to a consultancy in North Wales, he moved the family to Llanddulas in 1954 which became home for over 60 years.
Lyons was educated at Oriel House School, St. Asaph, and Epsom College, Surrey, before attending Jesus College, Oxford. He initially read Law but, after passing Moderations, decided to study History, graduating in 1968 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern History, first class.
In 1968, he married Jacqueline James, with whom he had three daughters, Blaise, Holly and Claudine. They separated in 2001 and were divorced in 2004. Since 2005 he has been the partner of University of New South Wales colleague Mina Roces.
In 1968, Lyons embarked on doctoral research into the history of Toulouse during the French Revolution, under the supervision of Richard Cobb. He was a member of a small group of Oxford researchers (including Colin Lucas, Alan Forrest, Bill Edmonds, William Scott) developing a view of the French Revolution from its municipal and provincial grassroots. He received his D. Phil. in 1972. Cobb’s influence can be detected throughout Lyons’ work even after he ceased to be a historian of the French Revolution. One reviewer found traces of ‘sansculottisme’ in Lyons’ history of reading and writing. [2]
In 1971, Lyons was appointed Junior Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, where he co-organised a seminar in French History with Tony Judt and represented the college at football and cricket. He published France under the Directory (1975), the first of three successful general histories of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period.
In 1975, he became the Research Fellow in Arts at Durham University, where he published a version of his doctoral thesis, Revolution and Terror in Toulouse (1978). The French translation by Philippe Wolff was awarded the Prix Fayolle in 1981 by the Toulouse Académie des Jeux Floraux.
In 1977, finding it difficult to enter the academic job market in Britain, he emigrated to Australia with his young family to take up a Lectureship at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Here he stayed, becoming Head of History (1991–94) and Associate Dean for Research and Postgraduates (2002–07), having been appointed full professor in 1998. He has been a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities since 1997. [3] In 2003 he was awarded the Australian Commonwealth Medal for service to the humanities. He served as president of the Australian Historical Association (2008-2010) and was president of the organising committee for the 20th quinquennial International Congress of the Historical Sciences (CISH), which he had persuaded to convene at the University of New South Wales in 2005. He is a Patron of the Network of Concerned Historians.
He taught undergraduates at all levels in History and European Studies, designing successful courses notably on ‘Annales History and the History of Mentalities’ and on ‘Modern Italy since Napoleon’. He was regularly involved in inter-disciplinary team teaching, for instance in ‘Culture and Tradition’, taught with specialists in Politics, Sociology and Literary Studies.
He was one of the co-founders of the George Rudé Seminar in French History, which has met biennially in Australia or New Zealand since 1978. Lyons published Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (1994), commissioned by Macmillan UK, a general history which at the same time contributed to historical debates, followed by Post-Revolutionary Europe 1815-1856 (2006). This was the last of a trilogy which had begun with his book on the Directory, and which adopted a progressively pan-European perspective. The international scope of his work would become a hallmark.
In 1986, Lyons published The Totem and the Tricolour: a short history of New Caledonia since 1774, a work conceived as an antidote to what he perceived as distorted reporting of New Caledonia’s political upheavals in the Australian press. The book was attacked both by pro-French colleagues and by supporters of the Kanak independence movement – a result he felt demonstrated his own even-handedness.
This foray into the Pacific had no sequel; Lyons had since 1977 become more interested in the history of the book, and after ten years’ research, he produced Le Triomphe du Livre: une histoire sociologique de la lecture dans la France du 19e siècle (1987), his first substantial monograph and perhaps his most influential, especially in its original ideas for calculating the bestsellers of the period. It was followed by another monograph on the history of reading in France, Readers and Society in 19th-Century France: Women, Workers, Peasants (2008), which contrasted normative works on reading with the experiences of actual readers.
During a highly productive sabbatical leave in Paris in 1984, Lyons had attended Roger Chartier’s seminar at the École des Hautes Études – a turning point which both validated his previous approaches and generated many new ideas for future research. One was the potential richness of oral histories of the reading experience. With Lucy Taksa he published the pioneering study in this field, Australian Readers Remember: an oral history (1992). Chartier had been instrumental in securing the publication of Le Triomphe du Livre, and it was at his invitation that Lyons contributed chapters to the Histoire de l'Edition française, tome 3: Le Temps des Editeurs du romantisme à la belle époque (1985), and to A History of Reading in the West (1995).
Lyons made his mark on the history of the book and of reading practices in Australia. In 1992, a group of scholars met at UNSW to discuss a national history of the book and of reading in Australia. The aim was to explore the history of the production, dissemination and reception of literary matter, and to provide a new and original account of the history of print culture in Australia. In 1995, Lyons was appointed Executive Editor of the HOBA (History of the Book in Australia) Project. In 2001, together with co-editor John Arnold, he piloted home the publication of the second volume of a planned three-volume series, A History of the Book in Australia, 1891-1945. Lyons contributed seven chapters as sole or co-author, and critics hailed the book as a landmark achievement. [4]
Lyons’ work had turned from the history of book publication and distribution to the study of readers’ responses; he made a further shift into research on the writing practices of peasants and ordinary people. This line of inquiry produced several publications, including general books like A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World (2010) and collective works like Approaches to the History of Written Culture: A World Inscribed (edited with Rita Marquilhas, 2017). In addition, research into the history of ordinary writing led to The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860s-1920 (2013), a major monograph which led Lyons into archives in several countries, and in which he used material in four different languages other than English. He became an active member of SHARP (Society for the History of Reading, Authorship and Publishing) and served on its executive council (2015–19).
Lyons returned to the southwest of France, where he had originally served his apprenticeship as a researcher, to prepare The Pyrenees in the Modern Era: Reinventions of a Landscape, 1775-2012 (2018), but this time he embraced sources in Spanish (Castilian) and Catalan as well as in French.
Work on writing practices continued with a study of the impact of the typewriter (The Typewriter Century, 2021), and of correspondence to superiors, which Lyons labelled ‘Writing Upwards’ (Dear Prime Minister: Letters to Robert Menzies, 1949-1966, 2021).
Lyons mentored and sponsored several overseas-based scholars, and frequently translated their work gratis for publication, either from French or Spanish. He was a foundation co-editor of Lingua Franca, an electronic journal dedicated to the translation of work in book history originally published in languages other than English (2015-2021). Apart from western Europe and especially the Nordic countries, South America proved a receptive audience for Lyons’ work. Various books and articles of his were translated and published in Rio de Janeiro (Casa da Palavra & Telha), Buenos Aires (Ampersand) or Bogotá (Universidad del Rosario), and Lyons made invited lecturing visits to Brazil (1999, 2013), Colombia (2018) and Argentina (2018).
Overall, Lyons’ work is characterised by its substantial empirical foundation, and by the search for actual flesh-and-blood readers and writers. It shows a sensitivity to ordinary people’s encounters with literacy and their experience of loss and separation. In the words of Roger Chartier, Lyons ‘recalls for us the importance of understanding the fragility of lives, the dreams or sufferings of men and women of the past, and the respect we have to pay to their dead souls.’ [5]
Lyons was awarded the 2023 Merewether Fellowship by the State Library of New South Wales. He will research "Reading in Nineteenth-Century Australia: the autobiographical sources". [6]
Historiography is the study of the methods used by historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension, the term historiography is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic by using particular sources, techniques of research, and theoretical approaches to the interpretation of documentary sources. Scholars discuss historiography by topic — the historiography of the United Kingdom, of WWII, of the pre-Columbian Americas, of early Islam, and of China — and different approaches to the work and the genres of history, such as political history and social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the development of academic history produced a great corpus of historiographic literature. The extent to which historians are influenced by their own groups and loyalties — such as to their nation state — remains a debated question.
Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the social, cultural, and political milieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of human societies by denoting the various distinctive ways of living built up by a group of people under consideration. Cultural history involves the aggregate of past cultural activity, such as ceremony, class in practices, and the interaction with locales.It combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience.
The history of books became an acknowledged academic discipline in the 1980s. Contributions to the field have come from textual scholarship, codicology, bibliography, philology, palaeography, art history, social history and cultural history. Its key purpose is to demonstrate that the book as an object, not just the text contained within it, is a conduit of interaction between readers and words. Analysis of each component part of the book reveals its purpose, where and how it was kept, who read it, ideological and religious beliefs of the period, and whether readers interacted with the text within. Even a lack of evidence of this nature leaves valuable clues about the nature of that particular book.
Robert John Weston Evans is a British historian, whose speciality is the post-medieval history of Central and Eastern Europe. He was educated at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, and later at Jesus College, Cambridge. Evans was Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford from 1997 to 2011 and is a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He works on the post-medieval history of Central and Eastern Europe, especially concerning that of the Habsburg lands from 1526 to 1918.
Jean-Jacques Marcel Laffont was a French economist specializing in public economics and information economics. Educated at the University of Toulouse and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique (ENSAE) in Paris, he was awarded PhD in economics by Harvard University in 1975.
Print culture embodies all forms of printed text and other printed forms of visual communication. One prominent scholar of print culture in Europe is Elizabeth Eisenstein, who contrasted the print culture of Europe in the centuries after the advent of the Western printing-press to European scribal culture. The invention of woodblock printing in China almost a thousand years prior and then the consequent Chinese invention of moveable type in 1040 had very different consequences for the formation of print culture in Asia. The development of printing, like the development of writing itself, had profound effects on human societies and knowledge. "Print culture" refers to the cultural products of the printing transformation.
Ecclesiastical prisons were penal institutions maintained by the Catholic Church. At various times, they were used for the incarceration both of clergy accused of various crimes, and of laity accused of specifically ecclesiastical crimes; prisoners were sometimes held in custody while awaiting trial, sometimes as part of an imposed sentence. The use of ecclesiastical prisons began as early as the third or fourth century AD, and remained common through the early modern era.
Emma Wilson, is a British academic and writer, specialising in French literature and cinema. She is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Corpus Christi College.
Roger Chartier,, is a French historian and historiographer who is part of the Annales school. He works on the history of books, publishing and reading. He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collège de France, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Geoffrey Colin Harcourt was an Australian academic economist and leading member of the post-Keynesian school. He studied at the University of Melbourne and then at King's College, Cambridge.
Robert Garner is a British political scientist, political theorist, and intellectual historian. He is a Professor Emeritus in the politics department at the University of Leicester, where he has worked for much of his career. Before working at Leicester, he worked at the University of Exeter and the University of Buckingham, and studied at the University of Manchester and the University of Salford.
Toby Walsh is Chief Scientist at UNSW.ai, the AI Institute of UNSW Sydney. He is a Laureate fellow, and professor of artificial intelligence in the UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales and Data61. He has served as Scientific Director of NICTA, Australia's centre of excellence for ICT research. He is noted for his work in artificial intelligence, especially in the areas of social choice, constraint programming and propositional satisfiability. He has served on the Executive Council of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Stefan Berger is the Director of the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and Chairman of the committee of the Library of the Ruhr Foundation. He is Professor of Social History at the Ruhr University. He specializes in nationalism and national identity studies, historiography and historical theory, comparative labour studies, and the history of industrial heritage.
Nicholas Doumanis is a historian of Europe and the Mediterranean world. Born in Australia in 1964, he studied at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales, where he acquired his PhD.
Stephen Muecke BA, Mes.L (Paris), PhD (UWA) FAHA is Emeritus Professor of Ethnography at the University of New South Wales, Australia and Adjunct Professor at the Nulungu Institute, University of Notre Dame, Broome. He studied linguistics and semiotics, completing his PhD on storytelling techniques among Aboriginal people in Broome, Western Australia.
Frank Trentmann is a professor of history in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a specialist in the history of consumption.
Martyn Hammersley is a British sociologist whose main publications cover social research methodology and philosophical issues in the social sciences.
William Dymock (1861–1900) was an Australian bookseller and publisher. He was the "first native-born Australian to launch and maintain a successful bookselling venture".
Jane Chapman is a British academic, professor of communications at the University of Lincoln, a research associate and a former fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge and the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge. She is the author of twelve books and over 35 academic articles and book chapters.
Mark McKenna is a professor of history at the University of Sydney, noted for his work on Aboriginal history, a biography of Manning Clark and the history of republicanism in Australia.
