Emily T. Troscianko

Emily T. Troscianko, Ph.D. is a researcher and writer. She has a BA in French and German, and a Masters and doctorate in German literature, all from the University of Oxford, England. She has held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John's College, Oxford, and a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). She is coauthor of a textbook on consciousness, and is working on a book based on this blog.

Her current academic research focuses on the interactions between eating disorders and fiction-reading. It asks: can a history of disordered eating affect how people interpret literature, and can reading certain kinds of literature in turn have effects, positive or negative, on eating-disorder outcomes? The project began as a partnership with the UK's leading eating-disorders charity, Beat, and aims to explore both theoretically and empirically how textual interpretation interacts with the mind-body system that is an eating disorder.

Emily developed anorexia at the age of sixteen, and grew increasingly ill over the next ten years. In the summer of 2008 she began to eat again, and embarked on a course of cognitive behavioural therapy. Within a year, she regained a healthy weight (i.e., a weight that was healthy for her body, not a standardised BMI threshold), and she is now fully recovered. For more on her writing and thinking about eating disorders, please see her personal website at https://hungerartist.org.