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- Nicholas Dunn-McAfee
Nicholas Dunn-McAfee
Research Associate
Nicholas Dunn-M c Afee was awarded a PhD in English Literature and History of Art from the University of York in 2025. He previously studied English Literature at the University of Oxford (graduating top of his MSt cohort) and spent eight years working in Westminster public affairs and policy before returning to academia.
His AHRC-funded doctoral thesis (passed with no corrections) examined word picture relations, aesthetic experience, and intermediality in the works of the major Victorian poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
During his doctorate at York, Nicholas was Visiting Researcher at the Delaware Art Museum for The Rossettis, the major US exhibition; a Visiting Scholar at the University of Delaware in his second year; and conducted primary research at Harvard, Princeton, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. He co-organised Rossettis: In Relations, the international conference at Tate Britain, and Image/Text — What/Next?, a word-picture symposium at York, and has taught both English Literature and History of Art.
He also organised the Centre for Modern Studies research strand Touching from a Distance: Close Reading and Looking Now (2025/26), which led to a methodological conference on close reading at York.
He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow (2026/27) at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University, the first literary scholar to hold the position. He is finishing his first monograph, The Point of Meeting: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Double Works of Art, which builds on his doctoral research. He is also beginning a second monograph project, Aesthetic Intimacy: Poetry and the Visual Arts 1850–1910, which recovers a radical tradition of formally exacting, non-hierarchical relations between poetry and the arts.
His work has been published in Victorian Poetry (2024), English: Journal of the English Association (2023), Yellow Nineties 2.0 (2023), The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (2026, 2020), and elsewhere. As well as the AHRC and the Paul Mellon Centre, his research has been funded by the British Association for Victorian Studies and, at York, the Humanities Research Centre and the Department of History of Art.
