D.J. Sheppard is Senior Academic Mentor and teaches philosophy at Oakham School (Rutland, UK). His current research recovers interesting literary and artistic individuals and events of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods from undeserved obscurity.
He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Warwick in 1998 and has published on topics in continental and ancient philosophy. In 2009 he published Plato’s Republic (Edinburgh University Press/Indiana University Press).
In 2016 he published Theodore Wratislaw: Fragments of a Life (Rivendale Press), a biography of the late Victorian Decadent poet; the book was described by the Times Literary Supplement as a "careful, articulate and entertaining study." He has contributed biographical essays to Yellow Nineties 2.0 and The Literary Encyclopaedia.
Forthcoming work includes an essay on Walt Whitman and the 1890s poet Charles Dalmon in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and a companion essay on Alfred Tennyson and Dalmon, to appear as a Tennyson Society Monograph in 2027.
He is currently writing about the 1905 British premiere of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and preparing a biography of the overlooked actor and writer Robert de la Condamine ("Robert Farquharson"). He is a member of the Oscar Wilde Society.
He regularly gives talks and lectures on Victorian and Edwardian literature as well as on ancient philosophy at universities and schools, most recently at Imperial College London.
He can be contacted at djsheppard841@gmail.com.
Created 2 September 2025