Simon During is a New Zealander who studied at Victoria University, Wellington and the University of Auckland before completing his PhD (on George Eliot) at Cambridge. He first joined the English Department at the University of Melbourne in 1983 as a tutor. After visiting positions at the University of Auckland and the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley, he was appointed Robert Wallace Professor at Melbourne in 1993. As Head of Department there in the late 1990s, he was instrumental in establishing the Cultural Studies, Media and Communications, and Publishing programs. In 2001, he left Melbourne for Johns Hopkins, where he taught in the English department for nine years. Between 2010 and 2017 he was a Research Professor at the University of Queensland as well as holding visiting positions at the FU Berlin, Tübingen, Université Paris, the American Academy of Rome, University of Cambridge, and elsewhere. In 2017 he rejoined the University of Melbourne's School of Communications and Culture as an Honorary Professor.
He has made contributions to the studies of post colonialism, secularism, Australian and New Zealand literatures as well as to cultural studies. But he has mainly concentrated on relations between literary and cultural history and European (mainly British) literature. His books include Foucault and Literature (Routledge 1991), Patrick White (Oxford 1994), Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Harvard 2002), Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory, and Post-Secular Modernity (Routledge 2010), and, most recently, Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations (Fordham 2012).