Dr Rachel Dickinson PhD

Why study…

English Literature is a rich subject.  Reflecting our complex lives,  it overlaps and interlaces with many other disciplines.  I am particularly interested in how literature intersects with craft and art, nature and sustainability, history and the future, helping us encounter, create and live narratives of healthy, and truly wealthy ways of living. 

This approach is inspired by Victorian polymath John Ruskin who wrote: ‘There is no Wealth but Life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.’

Subject areas

English Literature in an Interdisciplinary Context with particular focus on the Long Nineteenth Century.

PhD

‘Bertha Hindshaw (1881-1955) and the Horsfall Museum Collection’ (PT from Oct 2021)

‘Space and Liminality in Mungo Park’ (GTA, PT 2016-22)

‘What does eco-poetry look like when you can’t get out of bed?: The mentally ill body in feminist radical landscape poetry’ (from October 2015)

‘John Ruskin and the designed landscape at Brantwood’ (Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship 2016-2019)

‘Ruskinian Utopias: a Route to Sustainable Futures’ (Faculty-Funded Scholarship from September 2016-2019) 

‘‘Making Rochdale: creative-critical responses to the literary geographies of place’ (Faculty-Funded Scholarship 2014-19)

MA by Research

 ‘Cause and Effect: Neo-Victorianism, Digital Cultures and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries’ (PT from October 2014; completed)

 ‘Rhetoric and Myth in Milton and Pullman’ (from April 2014; completed)

 ‘Locating Lost Masculinities in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’ (from October 2013; completed)

 ‘Windows of Alienation on Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (from September 2013; completed)

 ’Logic and Religion in Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher : Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and Symbolism’ (from September 2011; completed)

 ’The Rural-Urban Bind in Thomas Hardy’s Regional Novels’ (from September 2011; completed)

There are two interlinked strands to my current research interests: sustainable prosperity and textiles, as envisaged by the work of John Ruskin during the Nineteenth Century and as reinterpreted for the twenty-first century.

I am interested in the ways Ruskin repeatedly turned to textiles as the ‘simplest example which we can all understand’ of political economy, using ‘the acicular [needle-shaped] art of nations’ as a model for society. He argued that the world should function like a well-constructed textile: woven to last, with the strong supporting the weak, and with beauty naturally entailed in all. To that end, he identified the need to finance a green economy, protecting nature while facilitating economic growth; he stressed the importance of the local and regional, while encouraging his followers to learn from global models; he was passionate about the need for a holistic education, which would nurture the individual person and thus society as a whole; he was very much concerned with questions of how to be equitable and facilitate prosperity for all. Like Ruskin, who didn’t see any barriers between writing about art and writing about social change, I too look across traditional disciplinary boundaries to find common patterns and structures which might fruitfully combine with other, interdisciplinary perspectives to help frame new transdisciplinary models which address pressing concerns for our world and its future.

Media appearances or involvement

2022 Interviewed about ‘Celebrations: Victorian and Edwardian Greeting Cards’ project on BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking, episode: ’Preserving Our Heritage’ hosted by Naomi Paxton (aired 19 April) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0016969

2016 book review of Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District, by Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson for the Times Higher Education, 12 May https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-green-victorians-vicky-albritton-fredrik-albritton-jonsson-university-of-chicago-press

2014 Ruskin specialist for a 30-minute live discussion on BBC Radio Scotland’s The Culture Show, discussing Ruskin in general and specifically the Scottish National Portrait Gallery Exhibition ‘John Ruskin: Artist and Observer’ hosted by Janice Forsyth, the other contributor was the dance critic Kelly Apter (8 July), 

2014 Academic specialist on an episode of BBC Radio Scotland’s Women With a Past series. The focus was on Ruskin’s wife Effie and changing notions of marriage. Hosted by Susan Morrison and produced by Louise Yeoman. Impact: Yeoman contacted me after reading my book chapter ‘Of Ruskin, Women and Power’. Taped on location in Scotland 9-10 February and aired on 15 April. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0403swf

2008 Interviewed about John Ruskin, Sheffield and utopian movements on BBC Radio 4’s Making History (recorded 11 November, aired 25 November). http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/making_history/making_history_20081125.shtml