Nicholas Birns

Biography

Nicholas Birns is as responsible as any other single individual for the increasing academic prominence of Australian literature in the United States. In a 25-year association with the US-based journal Antipodes, from 1993 to 2001 as book review editor and then from 2001 to 2018 as general editor, Birns encouraged a diversity of viewpoints and a grounded American awareness of Australian literature, beyond whatever writers happened to be in vogue at any given time. Through refereeing, recommendations, master classes, and mentorship, Birns has fostered new generations of Australianist  scholars in the US, Australia, Europe, China, and the Middle East.  He has held fellowships at the University of Wollongong, University of Newcastle, and UNSW-Canberra. He is the co-editor of two companions to Australian literature, published by Camden  House in 2007 and Cambridge University Press in 2023, and also coedited the Modern Language Association book Options for Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature. He has published in many Australian literary magazines and periodicals. He is 2015 monograph Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, was nominated for the Walter McRae Russell Award of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and was reviewed extensively in the Australian print media as well as in TLS.

Currently teaching at New York University, after a long association with the New School, Birns includes  Australian literature as one ingredient in a pedagogical gamut stretching from the classical to the postcolonial. He also is active in introducing the achievements of Australian authors, to a more general public, as in this series of lectures on contemporary Indigenous Australian fiction that he is currently teaching at the New York Society Library. Aside from his work in Australian literature, Birns has published many books and articles, including studies of Anthony Powell, Roberto Bolaño, JRR Tolkien, and an overview book on literary theory, and studies of the early modern period and of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Birns has contributed to such publications as The New York Times Book Review, Journal of New Zealand Literature.  Arizona Quarterly, MLQ, Victorian Studies, Angelaki, and  Partial Answers. He has given invited talks in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and China as well as in the US and Australia. He has also served as Secretary-General of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals as well as on the boards of several academic and nonprofit organizations.