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

My research interests lie mainly in nineteenth-century literature, and I have edited novels by George Eliot and Anthony Trollope. I have a particular interest in the critic John Ruskin, and my books include Ruskin's Myths (Oxford: 1988), Ruskin on Turner (Cassells: 1990), an annotated selection from Ruskin's Fors Clavigera (Edinburgh: 2000), and edited collections of essays (Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (Oxford: 1999), and Ruskin and Gender (Palgrave: 2002), co-edited with Francis O'Gorman). My John Ruskin: Selected Writings (Oxford: 2004) has appeared in the Oxford World's Classics series.

I have also published articles on contemporary fiction and poetry, gender and genre, women's writing, nineteenth-century mythography, Victorian biography and autobiography, the relation between literature and the visual arts in the nineteenth century, and legacies of the eighteenth century in nineteenth-century writing. I am the general editor of the new edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature, currently in preparation (to be published Sepetember 2009). I am also working on a study of education and nineteenth-century writing.