Dr Melissa Dickson

Postdoctoral Research Assistant

Melissa Dickson worked for nearly 4 years as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Diseases of Modern Life project, before taking up her role as Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her research as part of the Diseases of Modern Life team explored new ways of listening, and new understandings of the body’s physiological and psychological responses to sound and music in the nineteenth century.

She has a PhD from King’s College, London, and an MPhil, BA, and University Medal from the University of Queensland, Australia. She is the author of Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019) and a co-author of Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (2019).

Selected contributions

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Sleep and Stress: Recordings from the Day

03 June 2019

Please see the audio files below.

Edited photograph of Santiago Ramón y Cajal's image of a nerve cell. Originally taken by Irene Tobón and posted on Flickr commons. Some rights reserved.

Videos from Mind Reading 2019: Adolescence, Literature, and Mental Health

03 June 2019

See the videos from our conference, Mind Reading: Adolescence, Literature and Mental Health

Videos from the Conference 'Sound Talking'

03 November 2017

See the videos from the day below

Photograph of Emilie Taylor-Brown swing dancing

Songs, Cakes, and Games: Thoughts on Performing, Baking, and Playing Our Research at Oxford's Curiosity Carnival

03 October 2017

On 29th September 2017, Oxford hosted the Curiosity Carnival - a city-wide public engagement event as part of European Researcher's night.

Keynotes from Mind Reading: Mental Health and the Written Word

06 May 2017

Both literature and clinical medicine deal with issues such as subjective identity, selfhood, and the social and cultural determinants of health and well-being.

Something in the Air: Dr Carter Moffat's Ammoniaphone and the Victorian Science of Singing

28 April 2017

Dr Melissa Dickson's article, Something in the Air: Dr Carter Moffat's Ammoniaphone and the Victorian Science of Singing, has been published in the Spring 2017 edition of the Science Museum Group Journal.

ERC 10th Anniversary Week

04 April 2017

The Diseases of Modern Life project was featured on the Humanities Division website as part of the ERC's 10th anniversary week celebrations and events in March.

A man lies dead or unconscious in his chair, his last glass of drink fallen from his hand. Lithograph by Lamy, c. 1860, after Villain. Wellcome Library, London.

Confessions of an English Green Tea Drinker: Sheridan Le Fanu and the Medical and Metaphysical Dangers of Green Tea

23 February 2017

Screenshot of article from Dutch newspaper (2/2)

Diseases in the News: The Heavy Burden of a Modern Age

29 September 2016

On 10th September 2016, the Diseases of Modern Life project was featured in the Dutch national newspaper Trouw.

A Very Trump of Doom: How the Simple Stethoscope Transformed Medial Diagnosis

22 July 2016

Dr Melissa Dickson's piece on the history of the stethoscope has been published on the Medium channel at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.

The Living and the Dead captures Victorian anxieties about science and the supernatural

22 June 2016

From telegraphs to television sets, new technologies have often been imagined as strange or magical in the popular consciousness.

The Victorians had the Same Concerns about Technology as We Do

21 June 2016

We live, we are so often told, in an information age. It is an era obsessed with space, time and speed.