Melanie Persson PhD candidate – on research and cooking shows

Melanie Persson is working on anthropomorphic picture storybooks as a PhD candidate at Deakin. And she’s also sharing her enthusiasm for gluten-free food in a cooking show…

The working title of Melanie’s thesis is “Unmasking the Inanimate: Diversity, Ideology, and Anthropomorphism in Picturebooks”. It examines children’s books that anthropomorphise non-living or non-sentient beings, exploring how they are made to come alive, and how they represent human identities.

Her research focuses on representation in children’s literature (hence her fitting @theveryhungrycoeliac Instagram username). She shares that the support she’s received from the coeliac and gluten-free community on her Instagram account has “completely blown [her] expectations out of the water”. A scroll through her Instagram comments proves that, with hundreds of people sharing their coeliac pride. From https://www.refinery29.com/en-au/masterchef-melanie-persson-gluten-free-coeliac 

Dunsborough-raised and self-confessed foodie Melanie Persson is out to prove that gluten-free food is just as good as the real deal.

The 27-year-old had always dreamed of competing on MasterChef Australia, but when she was diagnosed with coeliac disease six years ago, it seemed impossible.

“It was kind of like a pipe dream,” she told AAA. “And then I was actually diagnosed with coeliac disease when I was 21 so I thought it was completely off the table, but this year, the producer actually reached out to me on my Instagram . . . and encouraged me to do it.”