Rate My Professor Mark Byron

Professor Mark Byron is a Professor in English within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney, where he serves in the Discipline of English and Writing, part of the School of Art, Communication and English. He earned his BA, MPhil, and PhD from the University of Cambridge. His primary field of research and teaching is Modernism Studies, with a focus on poetry, novels, short fiction, and drama produced in the period 1900-1950. Byron specializes in the works of Samuel Beckett and Ezra Pound, exploring themes such as material imagination, geological motifs, and medieval influences in modernist literature.

Byron has received significant recognition through Australian Research Council funding, including a Future Fellowship (FT160100417) valued at $915,216 for his project 'Modernism and the Early Middle Ages,' which examines intersections between modernist poetry and early medieval learning. Earlier grants include Discovery Project DP110100161 and APD fellowship under DP0665330. He held a fellowship at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in 2009-2010. As President of the Ezra Pound Society, Byron edited 'The New Ezra Pound Studies' (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Other key publications encompass 'Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination' (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which analyzes Beckett's geological imagination; 'Historicizing Modernism: Ezra Pound's Adams Cantos' (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); 'Ezra Pound's Eriugena' (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014); and a critical edition of 'Ezra Pound's and Olga Rudge's The Blue Spill' (Bloomsbury, 2019). He contributes editorially to Sydney Studies in English as Associate Editor and Section Editor. Byron's career at the University of Sydney includes progression from Senior Lecturer to Associate Professor and Professor of Modern Literature. His scholarship impacts modernist studies through genetic criticism, archival research, and digital humanities initiatives, such as digitizing modernist collections.