Current PhD Student

Nicholas Dunn-McAfee

Thesis Title:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Double Works of Art

Supervisors:

Professor Matthew Campbell and Professor Elizabeth Prettejohn

Description:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), the painter, designer, writer, and translator was, according to both John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the most important and original artistic force in the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain.

Rossetti's visual-verbal double works of art—typically painting-poem composites that share a title, comment on each other, and elaborate on their joint subject—remain under studied. Their cross-medium composition presents a challenge to segregated art-historical and literary scholarship and monodisciplinary analysis. These visual-verbal constellations, which sit at the core of Rossetti’s oeuvre, continue to resist, disorient, and frustrate critical efforts.

My doctorate aims to recover Rossetti’s sophisticated use of picture-word relations to enable what might be said, thought, or done that could not otherwise be said, thought, or done. In turn, my work is concerned with meaning that can be constructed or found at the limits of—or contact zone between—the visual and the verbal. It contributes to our understanding of the viewer-reader and viewing-reading and develops on existing picture-word relations methodologies and theories—including the concepts of imagetext, image-text, and image/text; ut pictura poesis; ekphrasis; the 'sister arts' construction; and aesthetic criticism.

More broadly, my overriding interest is the relationship between poetry and visual arts in the late modern period (c.1750–present). My research and criticism has been published in English, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Yellow Nineties 2.0, Vides, and Aspectus.

I began my AHRC-funded doctorate at York in 2021, having graduated with a Masters with Distinction and first in class from the University of Oxford. I have been a Visiting Researcher at Delaware Art Museum (2023) and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Delaware (2023). Alongside my research, I have organised a number of conferences, including Rossettis: In Relations at Tate Britain (2023) and Image/Text—What/Next? at York (2022).