Professor Philip Payton

As Emeritus Professor of Cornish & Australian Studies, Philip Payton is acknowledged as a leading specialist on Cornish emigration history. His The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall’s Great Emigration remains the standard volume on the subject, and will re-aappear in a revised edition from University of Exeter Press in 2020. His study One and All: Labor and the Radical Tradition in South Australia, published in 2016 by Wakefield Press (Adelaide), highlights the impact of Cornish emigrants in Australian politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.His earlier book Regional Australia and the Great War: ‘The Boys from Old Kio’ (University of Exeter Press: 2012) is an in depth examination of the wartime experiences of one Cornish emigrant community, and complements his Making Moonta: The Invention of ‘Australia’s Little Cornwall’ (University of Exeter Press: 2007). 2020 will also see a new edition of his Australia's Little Cornwall: A Pictorial History (Wakefield Press, Adelaide), first published in 1978.

Philip Payton has also made a significant contribution to Cornish biographical studies, and two important biographies include John Betjeman and Cornwall: ‘The Celebrated Cornish Nationalist’ (University of Exeter Press: 2010) and A.L. Rowse and Cornwall: A Paradoxical Patriot (University of Exeter Press: 2005, paperback 2007). A shorter, introductory volume is D.H. Lawrence and Cornwall (Truran, St Agnes: 2009).

Philip is also author of Cornwall: A History (revised edition, University of Exeter Press: 2017), and edited the annual volume Cornish Studies, published by University of Exeter Press, for twenty-one years. His Maritime History of Cornwall, edited jointly with Alston Kennerley and Helen Doe, was published by University of Exeter Press.in 2014, and his edited volume Cornwall in the Age of Rebellion 1490-1690 will appear from University of Exeter Press in 2020. Notable earlier books include The Making of Modern Cornwall: Historical Experience and the Persistence of 'Difference' (Truran, Redruth, 1992) and the edited volume Cornwall Since the War: The Contemporary History of a European Region (ICS/Truran, Redruth, 1993).

Additionally, Philip has written widely on other subjects, and is the editor or author of more than 50 books altogether. The edited volume Emigrants and Historians: Essays in Honour of Eric Richards (Wakefield Press, Adelaide) appeared in 2017, as did his History of Sussex (Carnegie, Lancaster). His interest in the history of war is reflected in his Australia in the Great War (Robert Hale, London: 2015), 'Repat': A Concise History of Repatriation in Australia published by the Australian Government's Department of Veterans' Affairs in 2018, and More Than The Last Shilling: Repatriation in Australia 1994-2018, also published by the Department of Veterans' Affairs, in 2019.

Philip Payton joined the University of Exeter in October 1991 as Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies, then based in Redruth. He was promoted Professor in 2000. Previously, Philip served in the Royal Navy for a dozen years (including an appointment as Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and International Affairs at the Royal Naval College Greenwich), and continued in a part-time Reservist capacity for a further eighteen years. On leaving the University of Exeter in December 2013, he was appointed Emeritus Professor of Cornish & Australian Studies. He is currently Professor of History at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.

Professor Payton has held visiting appointments at Warwick University, the Australian National University, the University of Tasmania, and the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash university. He is an Hon. Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2017 he was voted 'South Australian Historian of the Year' by the History Council of South Australia.