Senior Lecturer in Literature
Overview
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.
Research Impacts
Melissa is passionate about equal opportunities in education and engaging audiences with historical, cultural, and social issues both within and beyond the academy. She is regularly involved with galleries, libraries, schools, archives and museums in giving public talks, engaging events and building and sharing knowledge between different groups.
Qualifications
- Doctor of Philosophy of Literature, King's College London
- Masters (Research) of Literature, The University of Queensland
- Bachelor (Honours) of History and Literature
Publications
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Book Chapter: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Dickson, Melissa (2024). Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Victorian literature. (pp. *-*) edited by Lisa Rodensky. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0204
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Book Chapter: Stethoscopic Fantasies
Dickson, Melissa (2023). Stethoscopic Fantasies. Sound and Sense in British Romanticism. (pp. 224-244) edited by James Grande and Carmel Raz. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/9781009277839
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Journal Article: The threads of history: why record your pandemic experiences for the RCPI archive?
Wheelock, Harriet, Dickson, Melissa and Barrett, Elizabeth (2023). The threads of history: why record your pandemic experiences for the RCPI archive?. Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 40 (2), 296-297. doi: 10.1017/ipm.2020.48
Supervision
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Sappho's Daughters: The Self-Empowerment of Female Intellectuals in A.S Byatt and Sarah Water's Neo-Victorian Novels
Doctor Philosophy
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Cognitive conversations between creative practitioners and the FND community
Doctor Philosophy
Publications
Book
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Dickson, Melissa, Taylor-Brown, Emilie and Shuttleworth, Sally eds. (2020). Progress and pathology. Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press. doi: 10.7765/9781526147547
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Cultural encounters with the Arabian Nights in nineteenth-century Britain
Dickson, Melissa (2019). Cultural encounters with the Arabian Nights in nineteenth-century Britain. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. doi: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474443647.001.0001
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Anxious times: medicine and modernity in nineteenth-century Britain
Bonea, Amelia, Dickson, Melissa, Shuttleworth, Sally and Wallis, Jennifer (2019). Anxious times: medicine and modernity in nineteenth-century Britain. Pittsburgh, PA, United States: University of Pittsburgh Press. doi: 10.2307/j.ctvk8w1tx
Book Chapter
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Dickson, Melissa (2024). Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Victorian literature. (pp. *-*) edited by Lisa Rodensky. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0204
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Dickson, Melissa (2023). Stethoscopic Fantasies. Sound and Sense in British Romanticism. (pp. 224-244) edited by James Grande and Carmel Raz. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/9781009277839
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Experiments in life: literature's contribution to the history of psychiatry
Dickson, Melissa (2022). Experiments in life: literature's contribution to the history of psychiatry. Sources in the history of psychiatry, from 1800 to the present. (pp. 101-115) edited by Chris Millard and Jennifer Wallis. Abingdon, Oxon, United Kingdom: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781003087694-7
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Disorders of the age: nervous climates
Shuttleworth, Sally and Dickson, Melissa (2021). Disorders of the age: nervous climates. Literature and medicine: the nineteenth century. (pp. 157-173) edited by Clark Lawlor and Andrew Mangham. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/9781108355148.012
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Dickson, Melissa, Taylor-Brown, Emilie and Shuttleworth, Sally (2020). Introduction. Progress and pathology: medicine and culture in the nineteenth century. (pp. 1-24) edited by Melissa Dickson, Emilie Taylor-Brown and Sally Shuttleworth. Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press. doi: 10.7765/9781526147547.00006
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Hats, cloaks, and stethoscopes: the symbolic fashions of the nineteenth-century medical practitioner
Dickson, Melissa (2019). Hats, cloaks, and stethoscopes: the symbolic fashions of the nineteenth-century medical practitioner. Fashion and material culture in Victorian fiction and periodicals. (pp. 108-118) edited by Nickianne Moody and Janine Hatter. Brighton, United Kingdom: Edward Everett Root.
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Charles Wheatstone’s Enchanted Lyre and the spectacle of sound
Dickson, Melisa (2017). Charles Wheatstone’s Enchanted Lyre and the spectacle of sound. Sound knowledge: music and science in London, 1789-1851. (pp. 125-144) edited by James Q. Davies and Ellen Lockhart. Chicago, IL, United States: University of Chicago Press. doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226402109.003.0006
Journal Article
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The threads of history: why record your pandemic experiences for the RCPI archive?
Wheelock, Harriet, Dickson, Melissa and Barrett, Elizabeth (2023). The threads of history: why record your pandemic experiences for the RCPI archive?. Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 40 (2), 296-297. doi: 10.1017/ipm.2020.48
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Dickson, Melissa (2022). Review of Brian McCuskey, How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method. Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, 4 (1), 149-151. doi: 10.46911/mfds6858
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Dickson, Melissa (2021). Review of Andreas Mayer. The Science of Walking: Investigations into Locomotion in the Long Nineteenth Century. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 95 (3), 418-419. doi: 10.1353/bhm.2021.0037
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Storytelling and poetry in the time of coronavirus
Barrett, Elizabeth, Dickson, Melissa, Hayes-Brady, Clare and Wheelock, Harriet (2020). Storytelling and poetry in the time of coronavirus. Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 37 (4), 278-282. doi: 10.1017/ipm.2020.36
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Dickens's nightmare: Dreams, memory and trauma
Dickson, Melissa (2020). Dickens's nightmare: Dreams, memory and trauma. Interface Focus, 10 (3) 20190076, 1-8. doi: 10.1098/rsfs.2019.0076
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Structures of confinement: power and problems of male identity
Taylor-Brown, Emilie, Dickson, Melissa and Shuttleworth, Sally (2019). Structures of confinement: power and problems of male identity. Journal of Victorian Culture, 24 (2), 137-145. doi: 10.1093/jvcult/vcy074
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Review of Figures of the imagination: fiction and song in Britain, 1790-1850
Dickson, Melissa (2019). Review of Figures of the imagination: fiction and song in Britain, 1790-1850. Modern Language Review, 114, 125-126. doi: 10.5699/modelangrevi.114.1.0125
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Dickson, Melissa (2017). Confessions of an English green tea drinker: Sheridan le Fanu and the medical and metaphysical dangers of green tea. Victorian Literature and Culture, 45 (1), 77-94. doi: 10.1017/S1060150316000449
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Something in the air: Dr Carter Moffat's Ammoniaphone and the Victorian science of singing
Dickson, Melissa (2017). Something in the air: Dr Carter Moffat's Ammoniaphone and the Victorian science of singing. Science Museum Group Journal, 7 (7). doi: 10.15180/170702
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Jane Eyre's 'Arabian Tales': reading and remembering the Arabian nights
Dickson, Melissa (2013). Jane Eyre's 'Arabian Tales': reading and remembering the Arabian nights. Journal of Victorian Culture, 18 (2), 198-212. doi: 10.1080/13555502.2013.772534
Other Outputs
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Australasian Health and Medical Humanities: Work-in-Progress Series
Stephens, Elizabeth, Dickson, Melissa and Sellberg, Karin (2022, 08 15). Australasian Health and Medical Humanities: Work-in-Progress Series The polyphony: conversations across the medical humanities
PhD and MPhil Supervision
Current Supervision
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Sappho's Daughters: The Self-Empowerment of Female Intellectuals in A.S Byatt and Sarah Water's Neo-Victorian Novels
Doctor Philosophy — Associate Advisor
Other advisors:
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Cognitive conversations between creative practitioners and the FND community
Doctor Philosophy — Associate Advisor
Other advisors:
