Doctor Francesca Melhuish

Dr Francesca Melhuish

Research Fellow

Research interests

  • Nostalgia
  • Politics of emotions
  • Gothic representations of race & gender

More research

About

I am a postdoctoral researcher, interested in nostalgia and the politics of emotions. My work attempts to move beyond conventional interpretations of nostalgia as a simple desire to go back in time. Instead, I am interested in exploring a plurality of nostalgias - particularly in understanding how the emotion can be used in political visions of a bright and hopeful future. In tandem, I am also interested in how nostalgia shapes gendered and racialised images of nations, often with colonial roots. I am therefore also interested in visual politics and am developing a new project to examine how nostalgia animates gothic representations of gender, race and the nation. 

I received my PhD from the University of Warwick in 2021. My doctoral research looked at how nostalgia shaped the key Eurosceptic political communities and discourses of the 2016 Brexit referendum. Parts of this research have been published in the Journal of Common Market Studies and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations

I joined PAIR in September 2024. Prior to that I was a postdoctoral researcher on a variety of funded Politics, History and Law projects. I have worked across the Universities of Birmingham, Durham, Nottingham and Warwick. Parts of this collaborative research have been published in European Security and Parliamentary Affairs