Xavier Pons is a French academic who became interested in Australian literature when he wrote his MA thesis on Eleanor Dark (q.v.) (1969). He went on to write his PhD on Henry Lawson (q.v.) (1978) and has since written on a variety of aspects of Australia's culture. Professor Pons is Professor of English at the University of Toulouse (France), a past president of the European Association for Studies on Australia (EASA) and has been a visiting professor and research fellow at several Australian universities.
As well as his publications on Australian literature, Professor Pons has written numerous books on Australian culture, including Le Géant du Pacifique (1988), about Australia's foreign relations in the Pacific area, and A Sheltered Land (1994), about economic and social conditions in Australia from a multicultural viewpoint. His latest book, a study of representations of sex in Australian writing, is entitled Messengers of Eros and will be published in 2009.
