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 disorders.
Between 2018 and 2021, I designed and ran Oxford University’s first writing program. From October 2023 to December 2024, I was a visiting scholar with the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I was being hosted by Sowon Park and Julie Carlson via their Literature & Mind Center, more specifically the Trauma-Informed Pedagogy project. You can read a short interview for Lit & Mind’s Featured Minds series here. I’m currently an associate researcher with the Oxford Kafka Research Centre.
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:
- Writing a book on the existential sides of exercise, about the life-changing joys of designing ways of moving (and being still) that match what our mind-bodies truly need and want in each personally defined life chapter
- Writing a book about female freedom, sex, procreation, and creativity, asking how organized religion has evolved so effectively, and what a future might look like where genetic and memetic evolutionary pressures operate differently
- 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 models of healthcare that emphasise practical behaviour and personal agency, pushing back against the general tendency to ignore behaviour in favour of psychologizing and to treat mental illnesses as conditions that can be dealt with via didactic, paternalistic methods
- 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 making all my own decisions about what counts as work and what counts as meaningful.
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.
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 better chance of 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 