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 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, copy, alter, and mis-read literary 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

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
• 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

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Dickson, P. (2020). E. T. A. Hoffmanns Rezeption in Grossbritannien. [[Media unknown]]
• Dickson, P. (2018). Grave duty, unbridled love. [Book Review; Times Literary Supplement]