Background
Nicholas Groom was born in 1966 and educated at Bedford Modern School and Hertford College, Oxford where he graduated with first class honours in 1988.
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Nick Groom
Edit ProfileProfessor of English Literature
Nick Groom Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts is Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter, a critically acclaimed author on subjects ranging from the history of the Union Jack to Thomas Chatterton, has edited several books and regularly appears on television, radio and at literary festivals as an authority on English Literature and the ‘Gothic’ and ‘British’ identity.
Education
He was made Doctor of Philosophy (Oxfordshire) in 2004 with his dissertation, Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Its Context, Presentation, and Reception.
Career
Groom became a lecturer in English at the University of Exeter in 1994, a Senior Lecturer in Post-Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol in 2000 and Reader in English Literature at the University of Bristol in 2003. In April 2000 he was a Visiting Associate Professor at Stanford University following which he was made Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago in October 2001. In 2007 Groom was made Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter and was appointed co-director of the Exeter Centre for Literatures of Identity, Place and Sustainability in 2008.
Groom’s research has ‘largely focussed on three areas.
Cultural formation and authenticity, including attribution studies (work on forgery and, specifically, Chatterton). National identity (Englishness and Britishness, including the Gothic).
And historicist popular culture and folklore (seasons and saints’ days)’. Groom wrote an essay on The Young Ones for The Cassell Book of Great British Comedy and in 2008 he nominated Rik Mayall for an Honorary Degree at the University of Exeter.
Following Mayall’s death in 2014, Groom was regularly interviewed to comment on Mayall’s unique contribution to English comedy.
Groom is a critically acclaimed author, has edited several books including a twelve volume edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare (London and Bristol: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995), has contributed over thirty chapters in edited collections, articles in several academic journals and regularly reviews books for The Financial Times, Times Higher Education and The Independent.
