Em P Dinah Birch MA, D.Phil., FEA

Personal Statement

Professor Dinah Birch CBE, BA, MA, DPhil, FRSA,FEA

Professor Dinah Birch is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Cultural Engagement and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She chaired REF2014 Sub-panel 29 (English Literature and Language) and was Deputy Chair of Main Panel D (Arts and Humanities), and is Chair of Main Panel D in REF 2021. External roles include chairing the Advisory Council for the University of London’s IES, chairing the Editorial Board of The Conversation (an international online journal for the dissemination of research: http://theconversation.com/uk), chairing the Advisory Board of The Ruskin Library and Research Centre at Lancaster University (where she is a Visiting Professor), and serving as President of the British Association for Victorian Studies.
Dinah has published widely on Victorian fiction and poetry, and on the work of the critic John Ruskin. Her books include Our Victorian Education (2007), and she is the general editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (7th ed., 2009). She has published new editions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (2011) and Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (2012) and The Small House at Allington (2014) with Oxford University Press. Her interest in prose style is reflected in recent essays on George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and John Ruskin, and she has also published work on the Brontë family and 19c education. She served as a member of the Man Booker prize panel in 2012. She is a regular broadcaster and contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books.

Prizes or Honours

• Visting Professorship (University of Lancaster, 2012)
• Inaugural Visiting Professor (Leeds Trinity, 2011)
• honorary doctorate (Lund University, Sweden, 2009)
• Invited to serve as inaugural Visiting Professor at Leeds Centre fro Victorian Studies (Trinity, Leeds University, 2009)