Career
She is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Exchange and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She was a student at Street Hugh"s College, Oxford and also undertook her doctorate at the University of Oxford. In 1980 she became the first woman to be elected to the Governing Body of Merton College.
Her work has been primarily on Victorian literature, and among the authors on whom she has published writings are Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Alfred Tennyson.
She has also edited two books on the Victorian critic John Ruskin: Ruskin and Gender (2002) and John Ruskin: Selected Writings (2004). Birch is serving as the General Editor of the 2012 edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature.
She is the author of Our Victorian Education (2008), writes regularly for the TLS and the LRB, and contributes to arts programmes on radio and television Jury chair Sir Peter Stothard called her " of Britain"s finest professional critics".
Birch lists Middlemarch by George Eliot as her favourite book