Melinda Harvey completed her Bachelor of Arts (Hons I) and PhD in English Literature at the University of Sydney. She has previously held lectureships at the University of Sydney, European College of Liberal Arts, Berlin (now Bard College, Berlin), ANU and RMIT University. Her research focuses on women's writing, especially in its intersections with modernism, the post-45 New York intellectuals and the contemporary literary scene. She is an established book critic, writing for the major Australian newpapers and literary magazines and in 2020 was a finallist for the Pascall Prize for Criticism, Australia's only award for arts criticism. She has been a judge of the Miles Franklin Literary Award since 2017. She collaborates with Dr Julieanne Lamond (ANU) and the Stella Prize on the Stella Count, which quantifies gender bias in the book pages in Australia. A current project is a study of women's unique contributions to public literary criticism, including Susan Sontag, Renata Adler, Elizabeth Hardwick and Jean Stafford.