Emily T. Troscianko

About

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.

Recent Posts

The Benefits of Writing Versus the Ethics of Publishing

A new “pre-publication study” suggests that separating “Do I want to write this book?” from “Should I publish it?” could be an important principle for the literary world.

New Study Asks the Question: Should This Book Be Published?

My prior research findings on the effects of reading narratives about eating disorders made it important to ask difficult questions about the one I’d just written.

Ethical Questions About an Anorexia Recovery Memoir

Personal Perspective: In 2015, I started writing a book based on this blog. It became a recovery memoir, but my prior research had raised serious ethical questions about the genre.

How to Audit Your Body Kindness List

How to audit your lists of “ways I look after my body” and “ways I expect too much of it,” to learn from them, change what you want to, and feel good about what's already right.

The Quiet Radicalism of Looking After Your Body

Many sociocultural pressures make friendliness towards our bodies difficult, but it offers an alternative to both corporatized wellness culture and punishing fitness regimes.

How Many Ways Do You Look After Your Body?

Lists serve many cognitive purposes, and we can take advantage of some of them by paying attention, through list-making, to the details of how we treat our bodies.

Letting Go and Letting Yourself Go: Benefiting From Both in Anorexia Recovery

Shifting our often unspoken scripts during or before recovery from anorexia can help dissolve the fear of “she let herself go” and lean into the subversion of letting go.

"Letting Go" as the Essence of Recovery from Anorexia

How easily do images of “letting go” come to mind for you? What does it mean to let your life be changed by them rather than by the “letting yourself go” alternatives?

“Letting Yourself Go” as a Block to Recovery

What does the phrase “she really let herself go” conjure up for you? What might it be preventing you from doing in your life right now?

Inducing Anticipated Regret and Ignoring Anticipated Guilt

Anticipated regret works to change intentions and behavior, so how do you get it to work for you? And how to avoid getting sidetracked by anticipated guilt?