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).
Keynotes from Mind Reading: Mental Health and the Written Word
6 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.
This one-day programme of talks and workshops seeks to explore productive interactions between literature and mental health both historically and in the present day.