Academic staff

Modules taught

 Undergraduate

• Culture, Criticism, Literature
• Critical Theory in Action
• Guilty Pleasures: Victorian Sensation (module co-ordinator)
• Crime, Culture & Transgression (module co-ordinator)
• Literary Pre-Raphaelitism
• Dissertation in English

Postgraduate

• Critical Debates & Methods

Supervision

I have examined a variety of PhDs on Pre-Raphaelitism, nineteenth-century poetry and the Victorian period. 

• I have supervised MA and BA dissertations across literature of the 18th and 19th centuries on Romantic poetry, Victorian poetry and fiction

Dinah is particularly interested in Victorian poetry, specifically that of the Pre-Raphaelites. Supported by an Oxford Brookes Research Excellence Award, she is currently writing a monograph on the interactions of literary and visual arts in Pre-Raphaelite art, taking into account the influence of nineteenth-century literature on book illustration, painting and the decorative arts from 1848 to the turn of the century. She is also editing The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (Longman Annotated English Poets). 

Books

• Roe D, Ed., The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti Vols. 1-3 (Longman Annotated English Poets), Routledge (2025)
  
• Roe D, The Rossettis in wonderland: a Victorian family history, Haus (2011)
  ISBN: 9781907822018
  Abstract The lives and achievements of the Rossettis are placed within the wider context of the artistic, literary and spiritual communities that inspired them and that they shaped in their turn. They worked with each there and in collaboration with the most famous figures of their day - the Barrett-Brownings, Tennyson, Swinburne and Ruskin - as well as within significant groups like the Pre-Raphaelites, Anglo-Catholics, Freemasons and suffragists.
• Roe D, Ed., The Pre-Raphaelites: from Rossetti to Ruskin, Penguin Classics (2010)
  ISBN: 9780141192406
  Abstract The Pre-Raphaelite Movement began in 1848, and experienced its heyday in the 1860s and 1870s. Influenced by the then little-known Keats and Blake, as well as Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge, Pre-Raphaelite poetry 'etherialized sensation' (in the words of Antony Harrison), and popularized the notion ofl'art pour l'art - art for art's sake. Where Victorian realist novels explored the grit and grime of the Industrial Revolution, Pre-Raphaelite poems concentrated on more abstract themes of romantic love, artistic inspiration and sexuality. Later they attracted Aesthetes and Decadents like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Ernest Dowson, not to mention Gerard Manley Hopkins and W.B. Yeats.Website 
• Roe D, Ed., Christina Rossetti: Selected poems, Penguin Classics (2008)
  ISBN: 9780140424690 eISBN: 9780141923673
  Abstract This new selection of Rossetti's poems brings together works by one of the most significant nineteenth-century English poets. It includes an illuminating introduction, a chronology of Rossetti's life and works, and explanatory notes.Website 
• Roe D, Christina Rossetti's Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose, Palgrave Macmillan (2007)
  ISBN: 9781349281879 eISBN: 9780230625204
  Abstract

  This new study focuses on the critically neglected area of Rossetti's devotional poetry and her prose, offering a critical intervention in the feminist construction of an important Victorian woman poet.
  

  Website 

Journal articles

• Roe D, 'Glasstexts: Seeing Through Rossetti’s Material Word'
  Victoriographies 10 (1) (2020) pp.33-51
  ISSN: 2044-2416 eISSN: 2044-2424
  Abstract

  Rossetti’s relationship to the material has always received critical attention, most recently in the work of Matthew Polotsky and Brian Donnelly. Eric Fontana has investigated the speech acts in his poems, but none has considered words themselves as material objects in Rossetti’s poetry.  Focusing exclusively on instances of glass inscription in Rossetti’s poems, I show how the poet’s material words recognise reading and writing as visual experiences we sometimes forget we are having.

  Analysing inscribed glass in three key Dante Gabriel Rossetti poems, ‘Words On The Window-Pane’, ‘Jenny’, and ‘Rose Mary’, I investigate the ways in which Rossetti’s glasstexts assume the duality of the surfaces on which they appear, arguing that they draw our attention to words as both things and pictures of things. I suggest that scratched, scrawled and engraved words enhance the contradictions and complications inherent in glass, and intensify the complex interplay between transitivity and reflection that defines the experience of reading itself. I also argue that these glasstexts are of their historical moment because, as Isobel Amstrong has shown, they are preoccupied with surface markings that betray glass as visible mediation, revealing its dual function as medium and barrier.
  

  Website 
• Roe D, 'Naturally Artificial: The Pre-Raphaelite Garden Enclosed'
  Victorian Poetry 57 (1) (2019) pp.131-153
  ISSN: 0042-5206 eISSN: 1530-7190
  Website 
• Roe D, 'Words About the Picture: Material and Metaphor in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Inscribed Picture Frames'
  Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 27 (2) (2018) pp.33-55
  ISSN: 0271-1435
  Website 

Book chapters

• Roe, D, '"Come and See": Christina Rossetti's Illustrations to The Christian Year' in Nicholas Tromans & Susan Owens (ed.), Christina Rossetti: Poetry In Art, Yale University Press (2018)
  ISBN: 9780300234862
  
• Roe D, '"Me, who ride alone": Male Chastity in Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and Art' in Trowbridge S, Yeates A (ed.), Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature, Routledge (2014)
  ISBN: 9781409455585
  Abstract Womanhood in general and female sexuality in particular are well-known preoccupations of Pre-raphaelite art and literature. The holy virgins depicted in the movement’s early period and the femmes fatales of its later years have attracted critical notice, both as projections of male desire and as shifting signifiers of nineteenth-century feminine identity. Less attention has been paid in recent years to the ways in which the Pre-Raphaelite depiction of male figures addresses male sexuality and masculine identity. This has not always been the case. From the art criticism of the early 1850s to Robert Buchanan’s 1871 treatise on the ‘fleshly school’ to Pater’s 1889 Appreciations, contemporary critics of the movement continued to be as exercised by Pre-Raphaelite artists’ and writers’ depictions of men as they were by the group’s portrayal of women.Website 

Areas of expertise

My research is concentrated in nineteenth-centuty British literature , with a specific focus on poetry and Pre-Raphaelitism. Poets in whom I take a particular interest are Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne. My work is heavily interdisciplinary, and my research often explores connections between nineteenth-century art and poetry. I am also interested in nineteenth-century material culture, as well as the art and literary criticism of the period. I would welcome research proposals in any of these areas.

 

Conferences

 Recent papers and talks

• 17 Dec 2018: "Allegorizing On Her Own Hook": Christina Rossetti’s illustrations to Keble’s The Christian Year' (Christina Rossetti and the Illustrated Book Conference),  Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the Watts Gallery
• 2 Feb 2017: 'Inside Out: The Enclosed Garden in Pre-Raphaelite Painting & Poetry', Royal Holloway Centre for Victorian Studies
• 28 May 2016: Keynote Speaker at AHRC-funded conference, ‘Reading the Pre-Raphaelites’, hosted by Birmingham City University and Birmingham Museums & Galleries
• 11 May 2016: ‘Christina Rossetti: Past, Present & Future’, English & Media Centre (London) CPD day on teaching Christina Rossetti’s poetry in schools
• 24 Oct 2015: Founders' Day Lecture, 'The Rossettis In America', The Pre-Raphaelite Society   
• Victorian Graduate Seminar, Faculty of English, University of Oxford. Lecture title: ‘Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetry’
• 13 - 14 Sept 2013: Conference co-organiser, ‘Pre-Raphaelitism: Past, Present and Future’. Organised jointly with Professor Christiana Payne (History of Art, Oxford Brookes), St. John’s College Oxford and the Ashmolean Museum 

Press, publicity and reviews

• 9 December 2019: Appeared on the BBC4 TV programme, 'Lucy Worseley's Christmas Carol Odyssey', to discuss Christina Rossetti's poem, 'In the bleak midwinter': https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000c5y4/lucy-worsleys-christmas-carol-odyssey
• October 2017: Discussed Pre-Raphaelite interpretations of Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott' in a promotional video for the National Gallery exhibition, 'Reflection: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8usTwS2tw3Y&t=6s
• 10 Sept 2012: BBC Radio 4, ‘Front Row’. Reviewed Tate Britain Exhibition, The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde
• 6 Dec 2011: BBC Radio 3, ‘The Verb’. Discussed Christina Rossetti’s poetry along with Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales

Further information

 

Twitter: @preraphsrule