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

Sort by

File It Under C...

03 September 2014

There is a folder in my desk-drawer at the moment, one of several containing the fruits of months of research into various aspects of nineteenth-century science and disease.

Cartoon from Punch, 'Forecasts for 1907'

The Bane of Modern Technology

05 August 2014

The tragedy of comedy, for those who work at creating it, at least, is that jokes will go off.

Illustrated geometric figures of Chladni

Sonic Wonders and the Wonder of Sound

13 July 2014

On Tuesday evening, I found myself listening to the sounds of burping sand dunes in the Mojave Desert.

A street scene with people and carriages deep in mud, street traders and musicians and hot-air balloons in the distance. Coloured etching by Paul Pry, 1828

The Nausea of Noise

03 July 2014

We are big on peace and quiet in Oxford. For eight hours a day, the most that is likely to disturb me from my research is the faint lowing of cattle in the fields behind the college, or the movement of papers around me in the Bodleian.