Fiona Stafford
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fiona Stafford | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1960 (age 65–66) Lincoln, England |
| Occupations | 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 |
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]
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] She returned in 2022 for an episode focused on Jane Austen's novel Persuasion alongside Paddy Bullard and Karen O'Brien,[11] and in 2026 for an episode on John Keats with Meiko O'Halloran and Nicholas Roe.[12]
