Melissa Hyde did her graduate work in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Her field of specialization is early modern European art, with an emphasis on cultural history, gender studies, feminist theory and the history of art criticism. She teaches courses on European art (especially French) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and on gender and the visual arts. She regularly teaches in UF's study abroad programs in Paris and Florence. Hyde has been the recipient of the College of Fine Arts Teacher of the Year Award, and was named the College of Fine Arts International Educator of the Year in 2005. She was awarded a UF Research Foundation Professorship for 2008-11. 

Hyde is the author of numerous publications that focus on gender and visual culture in eighteenth-century France. Her books include Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and his Critics (2006), and two volumes of essays: Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2003), and Rethinking Boucher (2006), to which she was a contributing editor. She is now writing a book on eighteenth-century women and the visual arts. She is consulting curator for an exhibition on Boucher landscapes (2011, Clark Art Institute), and another on 18th and 19th Century women artists (2010, National Museum of Women in the Arts). 

Hyde lectures widely in Europe and the US, and has held post-doctoral fellowships from the American Association of University Women, as well as the Getty Research Institute; and more recently, she has been a fellow at the Clark Art Institute.