Dr Melissa Dickson

• PhD (King’s College, London)
• BA (Hons), MPhil (University of Queensland, Australia)

I joined the department in January 2018, having worked for nearly 4 years as a Postdoctoral Researcher on ‘The Diseases of Modern Life’, an ERC funded project based at St Anne’s College, Oxford, investigating nineteenth-century cultural, literary, and medical understandings of stress, overwork, and other disorders associated in the period with the problems of modernity. I have a PhD in English from King's College, London, and an MPhil, BA, and University Medal from the University of Queensland, Australia.

I convene the second year module ‘Victorian Literature’ and the specialist third year module ‘Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction’.  I lecture and lead seminars on these courses. I also convene and lead workshops on the MA module ‘Nineteenth-Century Senses’, and contribute workshops to the MA module ‘Nineteenth-Century Voices’.

I welcome research projects and postgraduate supervision in any of (and any combination of) the following areas within nineteenth-century studies:
• Literature and Science
• Literature and Medicine
• Literature and Music
• Representations of the Senses
• Empire and the Orient
• Material Culture

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My doctoral thesis, entitled Under Its Spell: The Arabian Nights in Early Nineteenth-Century Culture, investigated the proliferation and reception of the Arabian Nights in the print and material culture of early nineteenth-century Britain. Tracing the presence and use of the Arabian Nights in British theatre, travel writing, children's literature, fiction, and poetry, I argued that this protean story collection, one that was known since childhood and intimately associated with the childhood consciousness, was not simply a fantastic other against which to measure and define the imperial self; it was an integral component of that self, its imagination, its memories, and its dreams. This research will be published as a monograph entitled Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in the Nineteenth Century by Edinburgh University Press in August 2019.

As a Postdoctoral Researcher on ‘Diseases of Modern Life’, an ERC funded project based at St Anne’s College, Oxford, I was part of a team investigating nineteenth-century cultural, literary, and medical understandings of stress, overwork, and other disorders associated in the period with the problems of modernity. My own work within the project focussed on education and overpressure, and nervous disorders and phobias, and I am currently completing a monograph on explorations of the body’s physiological and psychological responses to sound and music in the nineteenth century, tentatively entitled Listening at the Threshold.

I am a member of the British Association of Victorian Studies, the British Society of Literature and Science, the Australian Federation of University Women, and the North American Victorian Studies Association. I am also a Fellow of Goodenough College, London.

With colleagues at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and UCD Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, I am also working to build a network of researchers, service users, and medical practitioners who meet around a series of seminars and conference, and seek to explore the patient experience through the prism of literature and personal narrative to inform patient-centred care and practice. A successful pilot conference took place in Dublin in March 2017 (programme details here).