Ruskin To-Day Brantwood Lecture in association with the National Gallery
Ruskin’s relations with universities extended throughout his adult life, and they were often turbulent. Speaking as a Professor in 1872, he told his Oxford students that a university should be a place ‘where those who wish to be able to think, come to learn to think: not to think of mathematics only, nor of morals, nor of surgery, nor chemistry, but of everything, rightly.’ That’s not how universities are seen today. Though much has changed since Ruskin’s time as student and then teacher, his challenging views can prompt serious reflection about what goes on in universities, how they are governed and managed, what their future might be, and what it should be.
Dinah Birch is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Cultural Engagement and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She has published widely on Victorian fiction and poetry, and on the work of the critic John Ruskin. Her books include Ruskin’s Myths (1988) and Our Victorian Education (2008), and she is the General Editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009). She has published editions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (2011), Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (2012) and The Small House at Allington (2014) with Oxford University Press, together with recent essays on George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and John Ruskin. She is Director of Liverpool Literary Festival, and runs an annual short story competition for students and staff. She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, contributes to Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time and Sky Arts documentary broadcasts, and has served as a judge on the Booker Prize panel.
