TIFFANY WATT SMITH
I grew up in South London and studied Philosophy and English at the University of Cambridge. I spent much of my twenties working as a theatre director, including at the Arcola Theatre, the Young Vic and the Royal Court, before deciding that my heart really lay in academic research and writing. My PhD was funded by the AHRC, and explored the cultural history of flinching and wincing in the late nineteenth century. My monograph based on this research was published by OUP in 2015 as On Flinching: Theatricality and Scientific Looking from Darwin to Shell Shock. You can read about it here. Between 2011-2015, I held a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, and am currently a research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions, working on a five- year Wellcome Trust project called Living With Feeling. For this project, I am investigating the history of ideas about compulsive imitation, from the Victorian science of Phrenology to current debates on mirror neurons. I particularly enjoy engaging with non-academic audiences. In 2015, I finished writing The Book of Human Emotions which explores the cultural histories and politics of 154 different emotions (you can read some extracts of it here). I regularly talk at literary festivals, my writing has appeared in publications such as BBC Magazine, The Guardian and The New Scientist, and I often appear on BBC Radio. In 2014, I was named a BBC New Generation Thinker, and from time to time, still collaborate with theatre artists.
