Martyn Lyons

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Martyn Lyons (born 1946) is an emeritus professor of history and European studies at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He specializes in the history of the book, Australian history, and French history.

Early life and education
Martyn Andrew Lyons was born in Westminster, the eldest of five siblings. His father, Edward Lyons, was of Polish Jewish ancestry and worked as an ophthalmologist; his mother, Marian Spence, was of Anglo-Scottish descent and a nurse who became a county council leader in the UK. The family moved to Llanddulas in North Wales in 1954, where Lyons lived for many years. He attended Oriel House School, Epsom College, and Jesus College, Oxford. He began studying law but switched to history, earning a first-class BA in Modern History in 1968. He married Jacqueline James in 1968; they had three daughters and later divorced. Since 2005 his partner has been Mina Roces.

Scholarly training
Lyons began his doctoral research on Toulouse during the French Revolution under supervisor Richard Cobb, completing his DPhil in 1972. His early work, influenced by Cobb, explored grassroots sources in French history.

Academic career and publications
Lyons started as a Junior Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge (1971), where he co-organized a seminar on French history and published France under the Directory (1975). He then became a Research Fellow in Arts at Durham University (1975), publishing Revolution and Terror in Toulouse (1978); the French edition won the Prix Fayolle in 1981.

In 1977 Lyons moved to Australia to join the University of New South Wales, Sydney, as a lecturer. He later became Head of History (1991–1994) and Associate Dean for Research and Postgraduates (2002–2007), and he was promoted to full professor in 1998. He has been a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities since 1997 and received the Australian Commonwealth Medal in 2003 for service to the humanities. He served as president of the Australian Historical Association (2008–2010) and was president of the organizing committee for the 20th International Congress of the Historical Sciences, held at UNSW in 2005. Lyons is a Patron of the Network of Concerned Historians.

His teaching covered History and European Studies, including courses on Annales history, the history of mentalities, and Modern Italy since Napoleon. He helped found the George Rudé Seminar in French History and published Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (1994). He also wrote The Totem and the Tricolour (1986) about New Caledonia and Le Triomphe du Livre (1987), a sociological history of reading in 19th-century France, and Readers and Society in 19th-Century France: Women, Workers, Peasants (2008).

A turning point came during a 1984 sabbatical in Paris with Roger Chartier, which broadened his approach to oral histories of reading. With Lucy Taksa, he published Australian Readers Remember: an oral history of reading, 1890–1930 (1992) and contributed to edited volumes on the history of reading in the West. He played a leading role in the History of the Book in Australia (HOBA) project, becoming its executive editor in 1995 and helping publish A History of the Book in Australia, 1891–1945 (2001). His later work shifted toward readers’ responses and the writing practices of ordinary people, producing The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860s–1920 (2013) and The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices (2021). He also explored correspondence and writing cultures, including Dear Prime Minister: Letters to Robert Menzies, 1949–1966 (2021), and wrote about the Pyrenees in the modern era (2018).

Lyons has mentored many scholars and translated works from French or Spanish for publication. He helped found Lingua Franca, an electronic journal for translating book-history work. His research has been internationally influential, with translations and lectures across Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and beyond. In 2023, he was awarded the Merewether Fellowship by the State Library of New South Wales to study Reading in Nineteenth-Century Australia using autobiographical sources.

Selected publications (highlights)
- Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (1994)
- The Totem and the Tricolour: A Short History of New Caledonia since 1774 (1986)
- Le Triomphe du Livre: Une histoire sociologique de la lecture dans la France du XIXe siècle (1987)
- Readers and Society in nineteenth-century France: Workers, Women, Peasants (2001/2008 edition)
- A History of the Book in Australia, 1891–1945 (co-editor, 2001)
- The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860s–1920 (2013)
- The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices (2021)
- Dear Prime Minister: Letters to Robert Menzies, 1949–1966 (2021)
- The Pyrenees in the Modern Era: Reinventions of a Landscape, 1775–2012 (2018)

Recognition
Lyons was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1997) and received the Australian Commonwealth Medal (2003). In 2023 he earned the Merewether Fellowship for his work on reading in 19th-century Australia.

Martyn Lyons is known for his substantial empirical work and his focus on real readers and writers, highlighting how literacy shaped lives and communities in Europe and the Pacific.