History of ASEC
Background
The Australian Scholarly Editions Centre was established in 1993. Its director was Paul Eggert. It was established primarily to house the Academy Editions of Australian Literature project, undertaken on behalf of the Australian Academy of the Humanties and sponsored by the Australian Research Council, the Academy itself, as well as private foundations.
In 2007 the tenth and final volume of the Academy Editions series of full-scale scholarly editions appeared. This was Volume 2 of Mary Gilmore’s Collected Verse, edited by Jennifer Strauss. The volume was launched by David Malouf. This followed the launch by Justice Michael Kirby at the High Court of Australia in 2006 of Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms, edited by Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby. The various Academy Editions, published by the University of Queensland Press have attracted much praise from reviewers.
In 2004 the Centre’s other major project, the Colonial Texts Series, was brought to completion with its eighth volume. Samples from each volume of both series and details of other Centre publications also appear on this website, including Margaret Roberts’s variorum electronic edition of the Collected Verse of John Shaw Neilson (2005) and Elizabeth Perkins and Elizabeth Holt’s Analytical Finding List (2002) of the poems of Charles Harpur.
PhD students
Kym McCauley, Roger Osborne and Thérèse Weber completed PhDs in textual studies within ASEC during 1999–2001 (on Henry Lawson, Joseph Conrad and Georgiana McCrae, respectively) and Phill Berrie, the programmer for the Centre’s MacCASE software, investigated a system of incremental encoding of SGML documents on demand (which later developed into Just In Time Markup), as part of his Masters of Information Science degree (1998).
Visiting Fellows
The Centre hosted Visiting Fellows on sabbatical or other leave. Fellows were usually connected with one of the Centre’s projects. Fellows included Dr. Rosemary Campbell (ANU), Dr. Chris Tiffin (University of Queensland) and Dr. Peter Robinson (Oxford and De Montfort). Prof. Peter Shillingsburg (De Montfort) visited in 2002 and Associate Professor Graham Barwell (Wollongong) in 2004. Dr. Bryan Coleborne was appointed Visiting Fellow for 2003-2006, as was Dr Roger Osborne (postdoctoral fellow, University of Queensland). Prof. Mary Jane Edwards (Carleton University, Ottawa) was a visiting fellow in March-April 2005.
The completion of the Academy Editions project marked the end of the Centre's formal activities, which had begun in 1993, with Paul Eggert as its director. The ongoing projects continue under the aegis of the host School of Humanities and Social Sciences.