Emily Troscianko - Profile picture
Credit: Emily Troscianko

Emily Troscianko

Research Associate

The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), University of Oxford

Profile – Emily Troscianko (b. 1982)

Emily is Sue’s daughter, and has many (mostly fond) childhood memories of Sue’s strange explorations of the paranormal, alien abductions, and memes, as well as of morning meditation sessions together before school. Emily studied French and German as an undergraduate at Oxford, and stayed there to do a doctorate on the works of Franz Kafka. Asking the question ‘Why is Kafka’s writing so powerful?’ led her to investigate theories of vision, imagination, and emotion, and to conduct her own experiments on how readers respond to different kinds of fictional texts. Having suffered from anorexia from age 16 to 26, she later began to connect her interest in mental health with her understanding of literary reading, starting to explore how fiction-reading might have effects on mental illness, and vice versa. Her current work is a mixture of cognitive–literary and medical–humanities research and various kinds of writing for audiences beyond academia. Like Sue, she seems to have had to give up having a job to write this book. When not writing, she can often be found driving her cow-spotted campervan around Britain, captaining her narrowboat along the Thames, or lifting heavy things (sometimes with Sue) in a powerlifting gym.

More biographical information

Profile, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), University of Oxford

Interview for Psychology Today on anorexia, July 2010

Interview for the Daily Mail, April 2010

Personal website

Publications

List of writings and publications

Citations on Google Scholar

Selected publications relevant to consciousness

Troscianko, E. (2010). Kafkaesque worlds in real time. Language and Literature19(2), 151–171. Full-text PDF (preprint) here.

Troscianko, E. T. (2012). The cognitive realism of memory in Flaubert’s Madame BovaryModern Language Review107(3), 772–795. Full-text PDF (preprint) here.

Troscianko, E. T. (2013). Cognitive realism and memory in Proust’s madeleine episode. Memory Studies6(4), 437–456. Full-text PDF (preprint) here.

Troscianko, E. T. (2014). Kafka’s cognitive realism. New York: Routledge. Google Books preview here.

Troscianko, E. T. (2014). Reading Kafka enactively. Paragraph37(1), 15–31. Full-text PDF (preprint) here.

Video

Cognitive realism and the ambivalent fascination of the Kafkaesque. Prague, April 2017

Short interview about her book, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism, March 2014

Discussion of her book. Book at Lunchtime, TORCH, Oxford, March 2014

Why we need cognitive literary studies to help us understand and treat mental illness. Stony Brook University, October 2016 (also audio version)

Audio

Interview on the Eating Disorders Recovery podcast, December 2016

Discussion of Kafka’s Cognitive Realism. New Books Network, May 2016