Lyn Jacobs grew up in Adelaide and attended Adelaide Girls High School. She worked as a book-keeper/clerk/cashier, and brought up a family, before taking up tertiary study. She enrolled at Flinders University, graduating with a BA Hons (1979) and was awarded the Chancellor's Commendation (English/Drama) in 1977 and in 1978 the Ann Flaxman Prize (English) and the University Medal. She completed her PhD (Australian poetry) in1986.
She has taught at Flinders University since 1979 and has lectured in Australian studies and English since 1988, specialising in Contemporary Australian Fiction and Australian Poetry. Her reviews and articles on contemporary Australian fiction, Australian poetry and Australian women's writing have been published both in Australia and overseas. She has been a contributor to World Authors 1985-1990 and to Who's Who in Australian and New Zealand Contemporary Women's Literature (1998).
Designing topics for the BA Australian Studies course led her to realise the potential of a bibliography of Australians writing about Asia. Together with Rick Hosking she compiled A Bibliography of Australian Literary Responses to "ASIA", published by Flinders University in 1995, and she continued to develop this bibliography in 2000 to form the Australian Literary Responses to "Asia" subset of this database.
Lyn travelled extensively in 1995, visiting 26 tertiary institutions in the US, Europe and Indonesia as a representative of Flinders University. She is an executive member of ASAL and a member of AAALS. Since 1999 she has been Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University.
