Professor Philip Payton

Philip Payton is Emeritus Professor of Cornish & Australian Studies at the University of Exeter, and was Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies 1991-2013. He is currently Professor of History at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and Honorary Professor in the Department of History at the Australian National University in Canberra. He is the author or editor of more than sixty books, most on Cornish topics. Recent Cornish-themed books include: The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall’s Great Emigration (revised paperback edition: Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2025); D.H. Lawrence and Cornwall: The Search for Utopia (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2024); More than Miners: Cornish Essays from South Australia (ed. with Jan Lokan: Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2023); Cornwall in the Age of Rebellion, 1490-1690 (ed.: Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2021); Pictorial History of Australia’s Little Cornwall (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2020), Cornwall: A History (revised edition: Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2017); One & All: Labor and The Radical Tradition in South Australia (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2016), and The Maritime History of Cornwall (ed. with Alston Kennerley & Helen Doe: Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2014).

Philip has also written Cornish biographies of A.L. Rowse and John Betjeman, and is currently working on Virginia Woolf and Cornwall. Recent volumes on other subjects include A History of Sussex (2017) and Vice-Regal: A History of the Governors of South Australia (2022), together with four books for the Australian Government Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

Philip may be contacted at: p.j.payton@exeter.ac.uk or philip.payton@flinders.edu.au