Professor John Haffenden
BA Hons, MA (Trinity College, Dublin), DPhil (Oxford University), FRSL, FEA
Room 1.15, Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
Internal extension: 28464
Phone number: +44 (0)114-222-8464
Fax: +44 (0)114-222-8481
email : j.haffenden@sheffield.ac.uk
Educated at Trinity College, Dublin (BA, MA) and Oxford University (D.Phil), I began my career at H. M. Prison, Oxford — where the first class I ever taught, while still a research student, took place in the recently retired `Hanging Cell´ (the inmates enrolled on the class were insistent upon encouraging their timorous tutor with relevant personal anedotes). Since then, I have taught at Oxford College of Further Education and at the University of Exeter, and I have spent periods as a Fellow of the Yaddo Foundation, New York; as a Visiting Scholar at St John´s College, Oxford; a Visiting Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge; and a Visiting Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. I have been in receipt of research awards from the Authors´ Foundation of the Society of Authors and the British Academy; and I have been a British Academy Research Reader and a Leverhulme Research Fellow. I am an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the English Association. A member of staff at the University of Sheffield since 1975, I was promoted to a Personal Chair in 1994.
One of my first books was a biographical study of the American poet John Berryman (1982), written with financial support from the Arts Council of Great Britain; and my edition of Berryman's poetry, Henry's Fate and Other Poems 1967-1972 (1977), was chosen by the Association of American Publishers for exhibit at the Moscow International Book Fair in September 1979. For several years I have been pursuing a major research interest in the life and work of the renowned poet and critic Sir William Empson — who was Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield from 1953 until his retirement in 1972 — which has included the editing of a number of posthumous collections of his writings: this series of publications includes Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture (1987), which was chosen by Sir Isaiah Berlin as one of the Books of the Year 1987 in the Sunday Times; a two-volume edition of Essays on Renaissance Literature: 1: Donne and the New Philosophy (1993) and 2: The Drama (1994): and a volume entitled The Strengths of Shakespeare's Shrew: Essays, Memoirs and Interviews (1996). Most recently I have published Berryman's Shakespeare (1999) and The Complete Poems of William Empson (2000), which was selected by Professor Sir Frank Kermode as an International Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement and as a Book of the Year in the (London) Evening Standard. I am currently at work on a biography of William Empson and on an edition of his letters on literature.
I greatly welcome PhD enquiries and applications in my areas of research interest: British and American poetry of the modern and contemporary peroids; textual scholarship and editing; and the theory and practice of literary biography.
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