Emily Troscianko

Dr Emily Troscianko is a coach, writer, and researcher. Her research focuses on improving outcomes in eating-disorder recovery, as well as on questions at the intersection of the health humanities and cognitive literary studies. In the latter fields, she conducts theoretical and empirical work on bibliotherapy, and more broadly on how language (including literary language) becomes involved, for good and ill, in the mind-body-behaviour dynamics of health and illness.

Emily’s monograph Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (2014) explores the strange phenomenon we call the “Kafkaesque”. Her Hunger Artist blog for Psychology Today deals with the science and experience of eating disorders and recovery. The latest edition of Consciousness: An Introduction (2024), co-authored with Sue Blackmore, offers a guide to thinking through the mystery of consciousness from the ground up. And The Very Hungry Anorexic (2024) is a recovery memoir that was ethics-tested via a randomized controlled trial to determine whether it should be published. Emily recently established a small publishing imprint, Tamarisk Books, to publish “intelligent weird books for weird intelligent people”. And as a coach, she offers eating-disorder recovery coaching, as well as academic coaching for students, researchers, and academics navigating work/life changes or career transitions.

During her fellowship at Wadham, Emily is working on four projects, all of them intersecting in different ways with the three strands of her professional life:

1. A work of nonfiction with the working title of Existential Exercise, conceived as a thought- and action-provoking invitation to explore and cultivate ways of moving (and resting) that work well for us at different stages of life.
2. A “novel of ideas” called How to Live Without God and Children, exploring questions of feminism, religion, and genetic and memetic evolution via the story of a mother and daughter living in a desert wilderness inspired by Joshua Tree National Park in southern California.
3. A journal paper on the roles of behavioural change, personal agency, and somatic (body-focused) work in eating-disorder recovery and other healing processes.
4. A potential grant application relating to the role of literature in mental health. Taking the works of Franz Kafka as a reference point, the project would investigate a hypothesis about whether and how the degree of similarity or difference between literary protagonists and their readers influences the therapeutic value of reading across different health conditions.

Emily welcomes conversations and collaborations arising from any of these interests. You can contact Emily via email.

Troscianko, E., & Leon, M. (2026). Can methods that focus on eating behaviour and individual agency improve success rates in eating disorder recovery? Journal of Eating Disorders, 14(1), 59. Open-access here.

Troscianko, E. T., Riestra-Camacho, R., & Carney, J. (2024). Ethics-testing an eating disorder recovery memoir: A pre-publication experiment. Journal of Eating Disorders, 12(1), 114. Open-access here.

Troscianko, E.T., and Carney, J. (2021). Drawing Kafka’s Castle: An experimental expansion of the theory of cognitive realism. Scientific Study of Literature, 11(1), 35-73. Paywall-protected journal version here. (Contact Emily for the full text.)

Troscianko, E.T. (2018). Literary reading and eating disorders: Survey evidence of therapeutic help and harm. Journal of Eating Disorders, 6, 8. Open-access here.

Troscianko, E.T. (2013). Reading imaginatively: The imagination in cognitive science and cognitive literary studies. In M. Burke and E.T. Troscianko (Eds), “Explorations in cognitive literary science”. Special issue, Journal of Literary Semantics, 42(2), 181-198. Paywall-protected journal version here. (Contact Emily for the full text.)