Professor Henry Power

I started life - or academic life, anyway - as a classicist. When I went to Oxford in 1997, it was to study Greek and Latin (or Literae Humaniores, as they insisted on calling it). But I soon realised that what most excited me about ancient texts was the way they had been read and re-made in the modern world. So I switched to Classics and English. After a BA in Classics and English (2001) and an MSt in Greek and Latin Literature (2002), I went to Cambridge to write a PhD on the classical sources of Henry Fielding's great novel, Tom Jones.

Most of my work since then has been concerned with the reception of classical texts and ideas by English (or English-speaking) authors. I have a particular interest in English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but I also write about (and teach) recent and contemporary literature; one recent research project is on the Homeric translations of Christopher Logue (1926-2011). You can read my essay on Logue here.

After leaving Cambridge in 2005 I was briefly a research fellow at the Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol. I was then awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, which allowed me to spend time thinking about the reception of the Roman poet Virgil during the English Civil War. Since 2007 I have been teaching at the University of Exeter.

In 2015, I published Epic into Novel, a book which looks at the way classical literature was consumed in the first half of the eighteenth-century, with a particular focus on Henry Fielding. Fielding remains a major focus of my research, and I am currently editing (with Professor Thomas Keymer) the Oxford Handbook of Henry Fielding.

In 2018/19 I was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, which enabled me to work on an edition of Joseph Addison's prose works. Addison is best known for writing periodicals such as the Tatler and the Spectator. This edition (due to be published by OUP in 2026) will present a number of lesser known works, in which Addison writes for a broad readership about the significance of classical art and literature. Addison is among the authors discussed in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640-1714 (2024), which I co-edited with my Exeter colleague Professor Nicholas McDowell, and which aims to capture the richness and strangeness of the period's prose. I contributed the chapters on 'Learned Wit and Mock-Scholarship' and on 'Recipe Books'.

One particular focus at the moment is the eighteenth-century poet and translator Alexander Pope. I have recently completed an edition of his major works, to be published later this year in the Oxford Twenty-First-Century Authors series. I am also editing Pope's translations from Homer for Oxford University Press.

In 2018 I was appointed to a personal chair. My inaugural lecture was on echoes of Homer in the works of Alexander Pope, John Keats, and Thom Gunn. It's available to read here. In 2024 I was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship in order to write a more substantial study of the role Homeric translation and imitation has played in the development of English poetry. The resulting book, Homer-Haunted: The Many Afterlives of an Ancient Poet, will be published by Bloomsbury Continuum in July 2026.

I have held visiting positions at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, at PKU in Beijing, at the Huntington Library in California, and at All Souls College, Oxford. During November/December 2025, I am a Fellow at the Leigh Fermor House in Kardamyli.