Robert Samuel Woof CBE FRSL (20 April 1931 – 7 November 2005) was an English scholar, most famous for having been the first Director of the Wordsworth Trust, which looks after Dove Cottage and runs the tourist attraction now known as Wordsworth Grasmere in Grasmere, the Lake District, Cumbria.
[citation needed] He was born in Lancaster, England, the youngest of three children of William Woof, a farm manager, and his wife Annie Mason;[1] his father was bailiff of Home Farm, part of the Royal Albert Institution, Lancaster.
He attended Pembroke College, Oxford on a scholarship, graduating in 1953, and gained a doctorate (1958–61) with a Goldsmith Travelling Fellowship as a lecturer at University of Toronto; his PhD thesis was on "The Literary Relations of Wordsworth and Coleridge 1795–1803".
Woof was a Lord Adams of Ennerdale Fellow (1961–62), and Lecturer (1962–71) and Reader (1971–92) in English Literature at University of Newcastle upon Tyne, holding a Leverhulme Fellowship in 1983–84.
Woof was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1998 and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000.