Fiona Stafford

Fiona J. Stafford FBA FRSE (born July 1960)^[1] is Professor of English Language and Literature and a Fellow of Somerville College at the University of Oxford.^[2][3]

Fiona Stafford FBA FRSE
Born	1960 (age 64–65) Lincoln, England
Nationality	British
Occupation(s)	Literary scholar and academic
Title	Professor of English Language and Literature
Awards	Rose Mary Crawshay Prize (2011)
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Leicester University of Oxford
Academic work
Institutions	Lincoln College, Oxford Somerville College, Oxford

Early life and education

Stafford was born in Lincoln but moved around during her childhood following her father's postings in the Royal Air Force. She studied for a BA in English language and literature at the University of Leicester, writing a dissertation on RAF slang. She then studied at the University of Oxford gaining an M.Phil. in English Language and Literature and a D.Phil.^[4] Her thesis was on The sublime savage: A study of James Macpherson and the poems of Ossian in relation to the cultural context of Scotland in the 1750s and 1760s.^[5]

Career

Stafford's first academic appointment was as a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford.^[6] After a short spell teaching in the United States, she returned to Oxford and was appointed a tutorial fellow of Somerville College.^[4] She is also Professor of English Language and Literature in the Faculty of English of the University of Oxford.^[2]

Her areas of research include "Ossian, Austen, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, Heaney, Carson, literature of the Romantic period, the literature of place, nature writing (old and new), Scottish poetry after 1700, dialogues between English, Irish and Scottish literature, literature and the visual arts, and contemporary poetry".^[7]

In 2006 Stafford was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.^[8] In 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.^[9]

In 2019 the University of Leicester conferred on her an honorary doctorate of letters.^[4]

Media work

In 2019 Stafford appeared in an episode of the BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time on Robert Burns alongside Murray Pittock and Robert Crawford.^[10]

Selected publications

• Time and Tide: The Long, Long Life of Landscape. John Murray. 2024. ISBN 9781473686328.
• The Brief Life of Flowers. John Murray. 2018. ISBN 978-1473686359.^[11]
• The Long, Long Life of Trees. Yale UP. 2016. ISBN 978-0300228205.^[12]
• Reading Romantic Poetry. Wiley/Blackwell. 2012. ISBN 9781405191555.
• Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry. OxfordUP. 2010. ISBN 978-0199558162. (winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, 2011
• Brief Lives: Jane Austen. Hesperus. 2008. ISBN 9781843919063.
• Starting Lines in Scottish, English, and Irish Poetry: From Burns to Heaney. Oxford UP. 2000. ISBN 0198186371.
• The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin. Oxford UP. 1994. ISBN 9780198112228.
• The Sublime Savage: James Macperson and The Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh UP. 1988. ISBN 9780852245699.
• Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. F. Stafford, Oxford World's Classic. Oxford UP. 2013.
• Burns and Other Poets, ed. D. Sergeant and F. Stafford. Edinburgh UP. 2012.
• Jane Austen's Emma: A Casebook of Criticism. Oxford UP. 2007. ISBN 9780195175301.
• From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations, ed. F. Stafford and H. Gaskill. Rodopi. 1998.