Cirrus@Austlit

Philip Mead was educated primarily in Australia, gaining his B.A. (Honours) from the Australian National University (1975), an M.A. from La Trobe University (1981), a Dip. Ed. from the University of Melbourne (1982), and his Ph.D from the University of Melbourne (1990). He has held academic positions at Deakin University, University of Melbourne, and the University of Tasmania. At the University of Melbourne, he was Lockie Fellow in Creative Writing and Australian Literature from 1987 to 1991 and Lockie (Senior) Lecturer in Australian Writing from 1991 to 1994. From 1995 to 2009, he was Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania. He was then appointed the inaugural chair in Australian literature at the University of Western Australia.

During the seventies, together with Alan Gould, David Brooks, Bronwen Levy and others, Mead was one of the founders of the periodical, Canberra Poetry. From 1987-1994, he was poetry editor for Meanjin, and since 2005, he has been co-editor of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

Philip Mead was co-editor with Gerald Murnane and Jenny Lee of The Temperament of Generations: Fifty Years of Writing in Meanjin (1990); with John Tranter of The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991); and with Marion Campbell of Shakespeare's Books: Contemporary Cultural Politics and the Persistence of Empire (1993).

As a reviewer and poet he has contributed to published collections such as Be Faithful Go : Poems (1980), The Spring-Mire : Poems (1982), This River Is In The South (1984), and periodicals and newspapers such as the Literary Review, the Phoenix Review, the Age, Island, Meanjin, and the Times Literary Supplement.

The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature describes his poetry as being 'concerned mostly with the inward experience, the consciousness of mutability, the curious paradoxes of memory .... or the promise of meaning offered by the natural scene.'

Mead's research interests include Australian literary and cultural studies (including the literature of Tasmania), contemporary poetry and poetics and Shakespearean institutions.