I’m a writer and researcher interested in literary reading, consciousness, and mental health, as well as a work/life coach (especially for individuals in academia and/or focused on writing) and a recovery coach for people with eating problems.
At the University of Oxford, I am an academic visitor at the Researcher Hub, which offers personal and professional development support to postdocs and other early-career academics. Between 2018 and 2021, I designed and ran the university’s first writing program.
Since October 2023, I’m a visiting scholar with the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I’m being hosted by Sowon Park and Julie Carlson via their Literature & Mind and Trauma-Informed Pedagogy projects. You can read a short interview for Lit & Mind’s Featured Minds series here.
My academic background is originally in French and German, and since my PhD my research has been somewhere between cognitive literary studies (the study of how human minds interact with literary texts) and the health humanities (bringing humanities methods and insights to bear in explorations of health-related questions). I write a blog on eating disorders called A Hunger Artist for Psychology Today, and I have a separate site, hungerartist.org, where I gather together the strands of my work focused specifically on eating problems and recovery.
Other current and recent projects include:
- Conducting research (theoretical and empirical) on whether reading narrative (fiction, memoir, etc.) can have positive and/or negative effects on people who have an eating disorder or are vulnerable to developing one
- Carrying out a pre-publication study on a memoir I wrote about recovery from anorexia, called The Very Hungry Anorexic, to assess whether or not it was ethically responsible to publish it (the motivation: the main research finding I’d previously made in this area was that most people with eating disorders find reading fiction and memoirs about eating disorders much more harmful than helpful, but I tried—and, it turns out, managed—to make this book different!)
- Developing behaviour-focused models of mental illness inspired by dynamical systems theory, pushing back against the general tendency to ignore behaviour in favour of psychologizing
- Expanding the ”high-behaviour” model for how to help healing happen with a second element, which I’m thinking of as the ”high-agency” strand; I recently submitted a paper to a public health journal exploring what mainstream eating disorder therapy and treatment could learn from coaching principles
- Co-authoring the fourth edition of the world’s leading textbook on consciousness, Consciousness: An Introduction, with Susan Blackmore (published April 2024)
- Working on wellbeing within academia, including via an initiative called Overcoming a Sense of Academic Failure (which includes a workbook and a series of five audio podcasts) and a blog post series on resilience
- Developing a Design Your Dream Morning course to help you bring personalized pleasure and purpose into your morning routines
There’s quite a bit going on here, and making it cohere (and fit into the time I’m willing to give it) is sometimes hard and always stimulating. I love being able to shape my days and weeks how I want, and being able to split my time between the UK (where I grew up) and the US (where my husband lives).
When in England, I live in a narrowboat on the river Thames in Oxford. I sometimes long to be walking the vast expanses of the San Gabriels (some of which I try to capture in my SoCal hiking blog), but I find respite from the laptop screen in taking my boat up- or downriver, taking my Volvo convertible out for a spin, lifting heavy weights in my post-pandemic marina gym, or just inviting someone round for negronis.
When in California, I have a room with a view of the Santa Ynez mountains, and a gym with an excellent (insanely hot!) hot tub—which turns out to be the ideal place for striking up chats with locals after the predictably excellent Californian yoga classes.
Finally, to give you a slightly fuller sense of what I think and care about, here’s a little something I’d like to leave you with.
If I had six wishes for humankind, and I couldn’t cheat and say “I wish for peace and happiness for everyone” straight up, then, to give us a chance at peace and happiness and other good things, here’s what I would wish on all of us:
- Sacrificing sacred cows. What’s stopping us from laughing at the rampant multitude of god myths, accepting that if any gods did exist they would not deserve worship, and getting on with being human in the here and now because there’s nowhere else to be?
- Procreating thoughtfully or not at all. In the age of contraception, and for the sake of world peace, planetary survival, and personal self-respect, it feels like the enormity of inflicting existence on another creature needs a lot more airtime.
- Being piquant listeners. There are so many bland gurus out there, telling everyone else terribly seriously what to do. How would things be with fewer of them and a lot more curious contrarians, experimental questioners, and people who listen and witness and think like they mean it?
- Not settling for surviving. What might our lives feel like, in banal and inventive detail, if we threw all the unnecessary disabilities to the wind, from the guilt to the acrylic nails, and embraced the aliveness?
- Eating by instinct not numbers. The count-everything dogma is crawling into everything. I would free many things from it, but I’d start with eating: with retraining ourselves to feel what our bodily appetites really are and say.
- Squatting to depth. Of all the many things that annoy me in gyms, barbell squats that stop with the thighs nowhere near parallel is the one I’d most like to magic away in a puff of smoke!
I’d love to see how this species and this planet would be with these six things transformed. What would be on your list?
Emily T. Troscianko 