John Holmes

John Holmes is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham and an Honorary Associate of Oxford University Museum of Natural History. His books include Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (Yale University Press, 2018, winner of the British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize) and Temple of Science: The Pre-Raphaelites and Oxford University Museum of Natural History (Bodleian Library Press, 2020), together with the edited collections Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions (Liverpool University Press, 2012) and The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science (Routledge, 2016), co-edited with Sharon Ruston. He is the President of the Commission on Science and Literature and a founder and co-ordinator of the Symbiosis network, which researches and fosters the role of the arts in natural history museums and collections. He is currently researching the role of myth and mythopoeic literature in shaping our understanding of evolution and vice versa, including Tolkien’s impact on prehistory and ecology.