Melissa Dickson

Melissa Dickson joined UQ in July 2023 as a Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the School of Communication and the Arts. Prior to this, Melissa was a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham in the UK. From 2014 to 2018, Melissa was a Postdoctoral Researcher on ‘The Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspective’, an ERC funded project based at St Anne’s College, Oxford, She has a PhD in English from King's College, London, and an MPhil, BA, and University Medal from the University of Queensland.

Melissa’s research focuses on the relationships between Victorian literature, science, medicine, and material culture, and she has published widely in this area. She is the author of Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), co-author of Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Pittsburgh University Press, 2019) and, co-editor of Progress and Pathology: Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2020). Her current monograph project is a study of the senses and in particular of new ways of listening and thinking about sound in the nineteenth century.

Melissa is currently Co-Investigator of a three-year project funded by the Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe, entitled Media and Epidemics: Technologies of Science Communication and Public Health, which seeks to document, from historical and contemporary as well as trans-disciplinary and trans-regional perspectives, the role of media and technologies of communication in the making and management of epidemic outbreaks.

Melissa is an experienced Masters and PhD supervisor and overseen projects on a range of topics, including child loss in Victorian supernatural fiction, Thomas Hardy and music, animals and the environment in the works of the Brontës, and the condition of women in the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and May Sinclair. She is available to supervise topics projects on Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literature and Science, Literature and Medicine, Medical Humanities, Sound Studies, and Narrative and Consciousness.