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.

My work is broadly motivated by a concern for the ways in which literary and visual artworks account for the processes by which they are made — meaning both the representational and imaginative work of composition and processes of material production. This has inspired writing 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. In my first book, Romanticism, Realism, and the Lines of Mimesis (EUP 2024), I investigated ideas about mimesis and imitation between Romanticism and Realism as figured in the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Honoré de Balzac, charted across a series of capricious lines (arabesques, facial contours, crosses).

I am now writing a book about doodling — drawing when we are supposed to be doing something else — and other forms of graphic errancy. The book proposes doodles as an opportunity for unearthing the promises, possibilities, and frustrations of paperwork: understood both as the administrative infrastructure of the knowledge economy and as any work that is done on, or imaginatively structured by, paper. Examining doodles, and fictions of doodles, by literary authors (from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Virginia Woolf), artists (from Paul Klee to Mr Doodle), and other more quotidian pen-wielders (from children to academics to the users of app-based drawing programmes), my book reconsiders the relationship between writing and drawing, the place of  boredom and distraction in the so-called ‘attention economy’, and the pleasures and frustrations of working with pen and paper. As a distinct form of thinking framed by the paper page, doodling is a paradoxically central form of paperwork, key to understanding its place in our working lives and minds and what is at stake in our ongoing shift to screen-based forms of work. The project has involved diversions into several other unsanctioned and marginal forms of visual art: sketches, squiggles, blots, graffiti, arabesques. It is rooted in my longstanding interest in the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, who was, amongst many other things, a prolific doodler.

Teaching and Convenorship 2025-26

• GERM1141 Literature, Film, and Image
• GERM1121 Pasts, Presents, Futures: German Cultures in Context
• GERM2121 Fluid Identities
• GERM3301 'Race', Colonialism, Gender: Narrating the World in the German-speaking Countries
• MELA45930 Critical Theory and Frameworks
• MELA45360 Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Academic and Administrative Roles 2025-26

• Director, MA in Languages, Literatures and Cultures
• PGT Lead on Education Committee

• 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

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

Chapter in book

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

Journal Article

• Chamisso's Bounding Lines
  
  Dickson, P. (2025). Chamisso’s Bounding Lines. Oxford German Studies, 54(1), 112-129. https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2025.2462461
• Bounded Narratives: Form, Containment, and Border Crossing in Nineteenth-Century German Literature
  
  Dickson, P., & Nitschke, C. (2025). Bounded Narratives: Form, Containment, and Border Crossing in Nineteenth-Century German Literature. Oxford German Studies, 54(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2025.2462446
• Fantasies of Home: Heimat in E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'Haimatochare'
  
  Dickson, P. (2023). Fantasies of Home: Heimat in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ’Haimatochare’. German Quarterly, 96(1), 6-21. https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12318
• Hoffmann’s Signature Doodles
  
  Dickson, P. (2022). Hoffmann’s Signature Doodles. Literatur Für Leser:Innen, 45(1), 77-91. https://doi.org/10.3726/lfl.2022.01.06
• Tracing Squiggles: Laurence Sterne, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Honoré de Balzac
  
  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
• 'Schlemihl for ever': two portraits by E. T. A. Hoffmann
  
  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
• "The Loosest Sketch in Nature...": Balzac, Sterne, et l'esquisse littéraire
  
  Dickson, P. (2019). "The Loosest Sketch in Nature...": Balzac, Sterne, et l’esquisse littéraire. L’Année Balzacienne, 20(1), 195-209.
• Figures of Feeling in Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin
  
  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

Newspaper/Magazine Article

• Anthropomorphic Carrot: Tales from Hoffmann
  
  Dickson, P. (2025, January 23). Anthropomorphic Carrot: Tales from Hoffmann. London Review of Books, 47(1).

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Doodle Nation: Notes on Distracted Drawing
  
  Dickson, P. (2024, July 17). Doodle Nation: Notes on Distracted Drawing. The Paris Review [Blog post].
• E. T. A. Hoffmanns Rezeption in Grossbritannien
  
  Dickson, P. (2020). E. T. A. Hoffmanns Rezeption in Grossbritannien [Website content]. E.T.A. Hoffmann Portal.
• Grave duty, unbridled love
  
  Dickson, P. (2018, July 20). Grave duty, unbridled love [Book Review; Times Literary Supplement].

Other (Print)

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