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Somerville College

Professor Fiona Stafford

Professor of English Language and Literature; Fellow of Somerville College

Professor Fiona Stafford's research includes literature of the Romantic period, especially Austen, Burns, Byron, Clare, Coleridge, Keats, Macpherson, the Shelleys and the Wordsworths. She is also interested in the influences of the Romantic period on modern literature and art. Her research interests also include late 18th and early 19th-century culture; Irish and Scottish literature (post 1700); Archipelagic literature and art; landscape, place and nature writing; trees, flowers, rivers, coasts and their cultural history; environmental humanities; literature and the visual arts. 

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Academic profile

Faculty of English

About

Professor Fiona Stafford is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She works on literature of the Romantic period, especially Austen, Burns, Byron, Clare, Coleridge, Keats, Macpherson, the Shelleys and the Wordsworths. She is also interested in the influences of the Romantic period on modern literature and art. Her research interests also include late 18th and early 19th-century culture; Irish and Scottish literature (post 1700); Archipelagic literature and art; landscape, place and nature writing; trees, flowers, rivers, coasts and their cultural history; environmental humanities; literature and the visual arts. 

She is a regular contributor to the literary magazine Archipelago and helped organise the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Clutag press at the Bodleian in 2025.

Professor Stafford's latest book is Time and Tide: The Long, Long Life of Landscape (John Murray, 2024), which has been widely reviewed and featured at several literary festivals including Hay, Edinburgh, Cheltenham and Wigton. She also delivered public lectures relating to her work on landscape in Dublin and Birmingham. In 2024, she published an Everyman edition of Byron's Travels. She spoke on Byron at the Trinity Byron Festival in Cambridge (April 2024), the Oxford Lieder Festival (October 2024), on BBC Radio 4 Front Row and at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where she worked on a creative collaboration with the artist Calum Colvin.

Other books include The Brief Life of Flowers (2018). Like her acclaimed book, The Long, Long Life of Trees (2016), it draws on first hand observation, literature, art, folklore, mythology, cultural history, natural science, botany and history of medicine. Professor Stafford helped create the new Literary Garden at the Oxford Botanic Garden alongside the director, Professor Simon Hiscock, and the designer Pia Ostlund, and gave a public walking tour in the garden in June 2025. She gave a lecture on trees in the Botanic Garden Winter series in 2020.

Her book Jane Austen: A Brief Life (2017) is a succinct critical introduction to Austen's life and works. She has given many public talks about Austen, especially in 2025, when she delivered many lectures relating to the 250th anniversary, including the event marking the opening of the house where Austen died in Winchester (May 2025) and at an international Conference in Porto. She has also worked as an adviser for TV companies and was interviewed on the BBC TV news channel on Austen's birthday, December 16.

She has also worked with Wordsworth Grasmere, providing a video talk about Wordsworth and readings for the Museum at Dove Cottage; with Sotheby's (September 2025); with the artist Jason Hicklin (The Vast Silence, Eames Gallery 2026); with the Malvern Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (Ledbury Festival 2022); with the Blenheim Estate (Autumn Festival 2022); with The Hayward Gallery (Among the Trees, March 2020); and with Chawton House (Spring Flowers and their Stories (2022).

Professor Stafford's project, The Dimlight Hours (2019), is a play based on her essay Home Front and inspired by a family wartime diary and was part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Expertise

  • English literature, especially Romantic period
  • Scottish and Irish literature, especially poetry
  • The novel, especially Jane Austen
  • Literature and the visual arts
  • National and regional identity in literature
  • Nature writing
  • Environmental humanities

Recent talks

Selected publications

Media experience

Professor Stafford has considerable experience of working with media and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio. She has presented a series for BBC Radio 3 on the symbolism, importance and meaning of trees, flowers and beaches and for coverage of BBC Proms 2022. She has also contributed to the literary magazine, Archipelago.

Recent media work

Languages

English