Staff profile

I am Assistant Professor in German in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. I took up this position in 2023 after arriving in Durham as as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in 2019. In 2018 I was awarded my PhD at the University of Cambridge, funded by the Wolfson Foundation, and I have held postdoctoral scholarships at Cambridge and at the HU Berlin. 

My research interests lie in German, French and English literary and visual cultures of the nineteenth century. I am currently writing a book on writers' doodles from the nineteenth century to the present day, a project that has involved diversions into several other unsanctioned and marginal forms of visual art — sketches, squiggles, blots, graffiti, arabesques. This work is rooted in a longstanding interest in the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann.

My research is broadly motivated by a concern for how scenes of writing and reading are contoured by the senses, particularly vision and touch. This has inspired work on embodied theories of representation and imitation; on writing’s intimate affinity to drawing; on psychoanalytic approaches to literature; and on the ways in which we read, fondle, copy, de-face, and mis-read texts. My first book (forthcoming 2024) gives an account of mimesis between Romanticism and Realism, charted across a series of capricious lines (arabesques, facial contours, crosses) in works by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Honoré de Balzac. 

• 2018: MHRA Postdoctoral Research Scholarship: University of Cambridge
• 2015: Katherine Mansfield Society Essay Prize: Competition Winner
• 2014: Society of Dix-Neuviémistes Postgraduate Paper Prize: Competition Winner

Authored book

• Dickson, P. (in press). Romanticism, Realism, and the Lines of Mimesis. Edinburgh University Press

Chapter in book

• Dickson, P. (2016). Interior Matters: Secrecy and Hunger in Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss”. In Katherine Mansfield and Psychology (11-22). Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474417556-004

Journal Article

• Dickson, P. (2023). Fantasies of Home: Heimat in E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'Haimatochare'. The German Quarterly, 96(1), 6-21. https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12318
• Dickson, P. (2022). Hoffmann’s Signature Doodles. Literatur für Leser, 45(1), 77-91. https://doi.org/10.3726/lfl.2022.01.06
• Dickson, P. (2020). Tracing Squiggles: Laurence Sterne, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Honoré de Balzac. Comparative Literature, 72(1), 53-67. https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-7909972
• Dickson, P. (2020). 'Schlemihl for ever': two portraits by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 42(3), https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2020.1773168
• Dickson, P. (2019). "The Loosest Sketch in Nature...": Balzac, Sterne, et l'esquisse littéraire. L'Année Balzacienne, 20(1), 195-209
• Dickson, P. (2017). Figures of Feeling in Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin. Nineteenth-century French studies, 45(3-4), 149-162. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncf.2017.0002

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Dickson, P. (2024). Doodle Nation: Notes on Distracted Drawing. [The Paris Review]
• Dickson, P. (2020). E. T. A. Hoffmanns Rezeption in Grossbritannien. [[Media unknown]]
• Dickson, P. (2018). Grave duty, unbridled love. [Book Review; Times Literary Supplement]

Other (Print)

• Dickson, P. (2015). Pease Porridge, Cold: What to eat at the North Pole