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.

I have supervised a number of PhDs on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, including recent and current projects on the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Constance Naden and Thomas Hardy, the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell, the legacy of Pre-Raphaelite art and literature within modernism, and physics in modernist poetry. I would welcome applications for postgraduate projects on Victorian poetry; on literature and science from 1800 to the present day; on literature and the visual arts; and on 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.

My research concentrates on the relationship between science, literature and the arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has two main strands. The first strand concerns the relationship between poetry and evolutionary theory. In Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (2009) I examined how poetry can inform and shape our responses to and understanding of the Darwinian condition. Since then, I have edited a collection of essays on twentieth-century poetry and science and I co-edited The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science (2017) with Professor Sharon Ruston at Lancaster University. I am currently working on a new research project looking at how evolutionary theory and epic literature have drawn on one another over the last 200 years. The second major strand of my research on science and culture stems from an AHRC Science in Culture Fellowship on the Pre-Raphaelites and science (2012-13). For this project, I examined their paintings, sculpture and poetry in the light of their art criticism, which repeatedly invokes science as a model for the arts. I also researched the shaping influence of Pre-Raphaelitism on Victorian science itself, particularly through natural history museum architecture and periodical culture. My book The Pre-Raphaelites and Science has recently been published by Yale University Press. Since 2015, I have been working on a further project on natural history museum architecture specifically, in Britain, Europe and Canada, in collaboration with Professor Janine Rogers at Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick. Our project, Building the Book of Nature: The Poetics of the Natural History Museum, has been funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Both in my research on poetry and in my work on museums, I aim to engage scientists and those interested in science as well as literary scholars. I have worked closely with a number of leading scientific institutions over the course of my research, including the Royal Society, the Natural History Museum, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Royal Ontario Museum, and I am one of the co-authors of a report for the AHRC on the value of humanities research on biology to biologists. Through these cross-disciplinary collaborations, I have been aiming to build up a much richer understanding of the significance of scientific practices and discoveries, and a fuller sense of how the arts can engage constructively with science.

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.