Dr John Holmes

John Holmes is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham and an Honorary Associate of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. His books include Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (2009) and The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (2018). He has worked very closely with the museum on their Visions of Nature programmes, including editing the collection Guests of Time (2016), which gathered together poems by the three poets in residence at the museum, Kelley Swain, John Barnie and Steven Matthews, along with Victorian poetry and photographs of the museum and its collections. Several of the poems from this collection are included in the song-cycle Endless Forms Most Beautiful, to be premiered at the museum.