Her research interests include modern and contemporary art, criticism, and the history of science, especially psychology and ecology in the postwar United States. Her edited collection of new media theorist Jack Burnham, Dissolve Into Comprehension: Writing and Interviews, 1964-2004, is forthcoming from the MIT Press in 2015. Her current book project Viewers, and Other Animals: Formalism and Environmental Aesthetics after WWII, describes the curious development of contemporary environmental aesthetics out of formalist theories of perception. She has written for Art Journal, X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, ARTLIES, Criticism, and Inform: Architecture & Design magazine. Melissa and her students are the founders of the micro-grant dinner series, Bozeman Soup, which has an event April 3rd at the Baxter.