Dr Oliver Herford BA, MSt (Oxford), PhD (London)

• BA, MSt (Oxford)
• PhD (London)
• PGCert (Birmingham)

I joined the University of Birmingham in 2014 after five years’ teaching in Oxford colleges, including three years as Darby Fellow and Tutor in English at Lincoln College. I took my BA and MSt at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and completed my doctoral studies at University College London.

I currently convene the third-year undergraduate option module Reading Henry James, and teach on the second-year module Victorian Literature. I lecture on various first- and second-year modules. I also convene the MA core module Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Studies. I qualified as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2016.

I welcome enquiries about research supervision in the following areas: Henry James, John Keats and his circle, life-writing from the Romantic period to the early twentieth century, literary editing, revision and textual history, collective editions, historical fiction, and the letters of nineteenth-century authors.

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

I work on British and American literature of the long nineteenth century, with a special focus on the late writings of Henry James. I am interested in the place of style in literary non-fiction, the theory and practice of textual editing, and the relations between personal correspondence and other types of life-writing (autobiography, biography, and memoir). 

My edition of James’s Prefaces to the New York Edition of his novels and tales (1907-9) appeared from Cambridge University Press in 2024, as volume 33 in The Complete Fiction of Henry James. 

My monograph Henry James’s Style of Retrospect: Late Personal Writings, 1890-1915 was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. The book examines the changes James’s style underwent in the last twenty-five years of his writing life, as his focus gradually turned from the fictional observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence. Closely analysing James’s style across a remarkable sequence of non-fictional works – the ‘late personal writings’ of my title: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir – I offer a revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James.

I have published articles and chapters on James's reading of Walter Scott and Honoré de Balzac, on his practice of literary allusion and on other aspects of his commemorative writing.

I have also published on portraiture, letter-writing and life-writing in the circle of John Keats, and I am currently working on an article on the materiality of Keats's letters.

I am beginning to explore directions for future research on the writing, circulation, and publication of literary correspondence in the long nineteenth century, and on historical fiction from Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson.

With Dr Louise Curran, I co-direct the Centre for Literary Editing and the Materiality of the Text (CLEMT) in the Department of English Literature. I am currently Vice-President of the international Henry James Society, and will serve as President for calendar year 2018.