Professor John Holmes BA, MA, DPhil

• D.Phil. In English Literature, Oxford, 2001
• M.A. in Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, 1997
• B.A. in English Language and Literature, Oxford, 1994

I was born and grew up in London, before moving to Oxford to do my undergraduate degree, back to London for my MA, and back to Oxford, where I completed a doctorate on ‘The Victorian Sonnet Sequence and the Crisis of Belief’ in 2001. After teaching briefly for the Open University, I got a job as lecturer in English literature at the University of Reading. I taught at Reading from 2001 to 2015 before joining Birmingham as Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture.

I teach nineteenth-century literature across the BA and MA degrees. I currently teach on second-year modules on Victorian and Decadent Literature; a third-year module on Literature in the Age of Evolution, running from the early 1800s to the present day; and the core nineteenth-century MA modules.

Literature and science from 1800 to the present; literature and the visual arts; the Pre-Raphaelites; Victorian and modern poetry; poetic form, particularly the sonnet and the epic.

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

I work mainly on the interface between science and the arts in the period from 1800 to the present. I have written books on Darwinism and poetry and on the Pre-Raphaelites and science, and edited or co-edited collections of essays on nineteenth-century literature and science and on science in modern poetry. My current research has two main strands, looking respectively at the role of the arts and architecture within natural history museums and at the cross-fertilisation between mythic literature and evolutionary science over the last two hundred years. In the course of my research and public engagement work, I have collaborated extensively with scientists and scientific institutions, including the Royal Society and the natural history museums in Oxford, London, Berlin and Vienna.

I have been actively involved in the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) since its inaugural conference in 2006. I was Treasurer from 2006 to 2009, Book Reviews Editor from 2008 to 2012, and Chair from 2012 to 2015. While I was Chair I helped to establish links between the BSLS and other related academic societies, including the international Commission on Science and Literature (CoSciLit), the European branch of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSAeu) and the British Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE-UK). I am currently Secretary of CoSciLit and am a member of SLSAeu, SLSA, the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) and the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA).

I am on the editorial boards of the Journal of Literature and Science and Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, and am external examiner on King’s College London’s MSc in Medical Humanities. I am an honorary associate of the Oxford University Museum and was a co-curator of the Visions of Nature year at the museum in 2016. I have been invited to speak about literature and science at conferences and research seminars in a number of countries across continental Europe and North America, as well as the UK.