Martin Paul Eve
Photo: Martin Paul Eve, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons21

Martin Paul Eve

British academic and writer (born 1986)

Martin Paul Eve (born 1986) is a British academic, writer, computer programmer, and disability rights campaigner. He is the Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck College, University of London and the Technical Lead for Knowledge Commons at Michigan State University.2

From Wikipedia’s article on Martin Paul Eve (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born May 26, 1986.1

About

Previously, Eve was Principal R&D Developer at Crossref from 2023-2024 and Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University until 2022. He is known for his work on contemporary literary metafiction, computational approaches to the study of literature, digital media studies and history of the book, and open-access policy. Together with Caroline Edwards, he is co-founder of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH).

Eve was the recipient of a 2019 Philip Leverhulme Prize, the 2018 KU Leuven Medal of Honour in the Humanities and Social Sciences, a joint recipient of the Electronic Literature Organization's N. Katherine Hayles 2018 Prize for his chapter in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature, and in 2017 was a shortlisted finalist for The Guardian's Most Inspiring Leader in Higher Education award. In 2021 Eve was listed by the Shaw Trust as one of the 100 most influential people with disabilities in the United Kingdom. In 2025, Eve was awarded the SHARP Book History Book Prize.

Eve has severe rheumatoid arthritis and end-stage renal failure due to BK virus nephropathy.

From Wikipedia’s article on Martin Paul Eve, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2

Companies

Early life and education

  • 2005 to 2008Queen Mary University of London Bachelor of Arts3 4
  • 2008 to 2009Queen Mary University of London Master of Arts3 5
  • 2009 to 2012University of Sussex Doctor of Philosophy3 6

Eve's academic work focuses on contemporary American and British fiction, textual scholarship, and digital approaches to the study of literature. Eve's earliest academic work focused on the novels of Thomas Pynchon, on whose writing his Ph.D. and first book focused. Eve is, though, especially well known for his work on David Mitchell and for uncovering and documenting the multiple textual editions of Cloud Atlas. Eve has also worked extensively on the American author Jennifer Egan, again uncovering substantial differences between the published version of her texts.

Following the work of Mark McGurl, part of Eve's ongoing project has been to chart the interactions between the academy and recent strains of fiction. With reference to the novels of Sarah Waters and China Miéville, for instance, Eve has termed this phenomenon "taxonomographic metafiction", which denotes "fiction about fiction that deals with the study/construction of genre/taxonomy". Eve's more recent literary studies work has turned to quantitative, computational, and digital-material approaches to the study of contemporary fiction, using approaches that have been praised for their rigour but simultaneously criticized for the amount of work that such methods require. Some of Eve's most recent work, published in Book History journal has explored the PDF format, demonstrating that Adobe's board of directors attempted to cancel its development, misunderstanding its conceptual importance.

Eve's work also covers the aesthetics and infrastructures of illicit underground digital cultures. His 2021 book, Warez, examines the pirate artefacts of the warez scene, arguing for the importance of understanding this culture's artforms. He has further written about the pirate e-book archive, Library Genesis, and its technical infrastructures for Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Eve is also known for his work studying academic cultures of evaluation. In his 2021 book, Reading Peer Review, Eve and his collaborators studied peer-review reports at the academic journal PLOS One. In this work, Eve et al. demonstrated that PLOS's attempts to shift reviewing cultures had not had the desired effect on the ground. Along with Jonathan Gray, Eve has also edited a volume on the global inequalities of scholarly communications.

From Wikipedia’s article on Martin Paul Eve (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Career

Occupation: literary scholar, scholar of English, writer, university teacher, lecturer, programmer.12

Known for: Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future, CLOCKSS, Open Library of Humanities.13

Eve writes prominently on his blog about his health and disability. Eve has rheumatoid arthritis, vasculitis, secondary immunodeficiency, hearing loss, and has had pneumonia, sepsis, and a stroke. In 2017, Eve was part of a group that protested against the inaccessibility of a lecture by Judith Butler, who met with this group to discuss these provisions. For his advocacy work, in 2021 the Shaw Trust named Eve as one of the 100 most influential people with disabilities in the UK.

From Wikipedia’s article on Martin Paul Eve (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Personal life

  • CitizenshipUnited Kingdom14

Awards

  • 2025DeLong Book History Book Prize15 16
  • 2019Philip Leverhulme Prize15