Fiona Stafford

Professor Stafford is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She works on literature of the Romantic period, especially Austen, Burns, Clare, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on their literary influences on modern poetry. Her research interests also include late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century culture; Irish and Scottish literature (post 1700); Archipelagic literature and art; Place and Nature Writing (old and new); Trees, Flowers and their cultural history; Environmental Humanities; literature and the visual arts.

Her most recent book is The Brief Life of Flowers (2018). Like her acclaimed book, The Long, Long Life of Trees (2016), it draws on first hand observation, literature, art, folklore, mythology, cultural history, natural science, botany, history of medicine.

Professor Stafford's project, The Dimlight Hours (2019), is a play based on her essay Home Front and inspired by a family wartime diary and was part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

She has also worked with Wordsworth Grasmere, providing a video talk about Wordsworth and readings for the new Museum at Dove Cottage; with the Malvern Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (Ledbury Festival 2022); with the Blenheim Estate (Autumn Festival 2022); with the Oxford Botanic Garden (Winter Lecture 5: March 2020); The Hayward Gallery (Among the Trees, March 2020).