Philip John Payton is a Cornish-Australian historian and Emeritus Professor of Cornish and Australian Studies at the University of Exeter and formerly Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies based at Tremough, just outside Penryn, Cornwall. An Australian citizen, he is Professor of History at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. Birth and education He was born in 1953 in Sussex. His mother was Cornish, from the Helston area. His father was a merchant seaman, then businessman and academic. Payton spent much of his childhood in Sussex and attended Haywards Heath Grammar School. Active in Mebyon Kernow (the Party for Cornwall) as a teenager, he began his writing career in articles on Cornish history and politics in journals such as New Cornwall and Cornish Nation. He obtained his first degree from the University of Bristol in 1975 and returned to Australia (where he had lived as a child) to read for a doctorate at the University of Adelaide, choosing as his theme the Cornish in Australia, completing this in 1978. Naval career In 1979 he joined the Royal Navy as an officer in the Instructor Branch, training at the Britannia Royal Naval College (HMS Dartmouth) (Dartmouth) and at sea in HMS Intrepid before being appointed to at Torpoint in Cornwall. Subsequently, he served at , and at the Royal Naval Engineering College at Manadon (HMS Thunderer) . In 1989 was appointed Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and International Affairs at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Until his retirement from the service, he held the rank of commander in the Royal Naval Reserve and has seen active service when attached to the Army in Bosnia and Croatia in 1993 and more later aboard the aircraft carrier in 2003 during the Iraq War. He finally retired from the Navy in 2008. Academic career In 1990 he gained a second doctorate, from the University of Plymouth, for a study of modern Cornwall from a centre-periphery perspective. He joined the University of Exeter as Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies, then situated at Pool, near Redruth, in 1991 but now at the Penryn Campus. He was promoted Reader in 1995 and Professor in 2000. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts. In 2013 he was elected an Hon Fellow of the prestigious Australian Academy of the Humanities, shortly before stepping down as