Credit : Alastair Hilton
ABOUT Me
Since finishing my doctorate in 2000, I have researched and published extensively on the meanings of health, medicine, emotions and the body in the past, and in the present.
My work has featured in many international media outlets, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Guardian, CNN and BBC Radio. I am a TED speaker and consultant on loneliness and mental health.
In 2019 I became one of the first UKRI Future Leaders Fellows, to undertaking leading research into the emotions and ethics of face transplants. You can find out more about AboutFace here.
I am currently Professor of Modern History at King’s College London, where AboutFace has evolved into the Interface project, exploring the surgery of face transplants alongside other technologies of the face – analogue and digital. I direct the Digital Futures Institute’s Centre for Technology and the Body, which explores all aspects of embodiment, medicine, health and emotions in the past, present and future.
My literary agent is Adam Gauntlett at Peters, Fraser + Dunlop.
Heart
In everyday parlance, the heart is a pump, the brain our emotions centre. So why do we put so much emotional and spiritual investment in our hearts and why are emotions ‘heartfelt’?
My work into the history of emotions and the body shows that prioritising the brain as the centre of emotions is relatively recent. Heart transplants, Valentine’s cards and the language of love are all reminders that the heart is far more than a pump. Find out more by listening to my Radio 4 interview on the subject, recorded in Westminster Abbey.
My book Matters of the Heart offers a new and exciting perspective on the heart as an organ of the body, the soul and culture. You can buy a copy here.
Latest Blog
Marilyn Monroe at 100: the face, the fantasy, the fortune
The lips, plump and red, are parted slightly, as if on the brink of speech, about to declare love, perhaps, or a secret. The eyes,…
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Connecting humans: from faces to consciousness
Last month, I found myself returning to a deceptively simple question: is there really such a thing as a loneliness epidemic? The answer, as ever,…
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The Many Faces of Truth
I appeared on BBC’s Moral Maze on Christmas Eve, and the subject was ‘truth’. Which got me thinking about how as historians and writers we…
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