As an associate professor of English, Melissa Free researches Victorian literature and culture, twentieth-century British literature and culture, and feminism.

She has particular interest in the female action hero and adventure fiction. She has published numerous articles in Victorian Studies, Conradiana, Genre, Joyce Studies Annual, Studies in the Novel, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Book History, and The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture (ed. Juliet John), and Victorian Freaks (ed. Marlene Tromp). She is the editor of "The Dead and Other Stories," by James Joyce (Broadview, 2014). Her current book project is “‘That Indefinable Something Besides’: Southern Africa, British Identity, and the Authorial Informant,” a study of gender, genre, and race in British South African literature from the