Professor Dinah Birch CBE is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Cultural Engagement and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. Dinah chaired REF2014 Sub-panel 29 (English Literature and Language) was Deputy Chair of Main Panel D (Arts and Humanities), and is Chair of Main Panel D in REF 2021.  She chairs the Institute of English Studies Advisory Council for the University of London’s and the Editorial Board of The Conversation.

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). She is the general editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (7th ed., 2009) and 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, and 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. She is President Elect of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS).