I give talks about eating disorders (especially anorexia) and recovery; about cultivating healthier, happier ways of relating to food and our bodies; and about mental health more generally (especially in a university setting). I have professional experience in innovative events design and management, and am always happy to tailor the format to suit your needs—from a straightforward talk with Q&A to a collaborative fiction-writing workshop or a body-awareness tutorial, or some mixture of all three. If you’d like to discuss a potential event, please write to me via the Contact page.

I have also worked in a consultancy role on projects involving eating disorders. For example, I was a member of the advisory board for the artist Daria Martin’s 2017 short-film adaptation of Kafka’s story “A Hunger Artist”, which performs the difficult feat of rendering this ambiguous story without resorting either to sensationalism or to over-elaborate metaphorical interpretations. You can read more here, and watch a short clip here.

Other past events and projects include:

  • “Food, bodies, and the wider world”: an intimate workshop at Merton College, Oxford, exploring areas like social eating, eating and academic anxieties, “clean” eating and ethical eating, and body image and cultural pressures
  • “Overcoming a sense of academic failure”: an event for Oxford graduates and postdocs, with an associated podcast series and workbook
  • A talk about time, art, and perception at the North Wall Gallery, Oxford, summarized here
  • A workshop series “Personal perspectives on mental health”, St John’s College, Oxford: honest early-evening conversations between students and academics, each led by an academic with experience of a specific mental illness
  • “Fiction and eating disorders”: an unconventional day-long workshop run with the charity Beat, involving science and humanities researchers, creative writers, and medics in collaborative fiction-reading and -writing
  • Contributions to a range of university welfare events focused on mental health
  • Contributions to recovery podcasts: e.g. on temporary bodyweight “overshoot” and other factors that make recovery possible, with Tabitha Farrar (2016); on “maintenance diets”, meat, and sex with Chris Sandel (2022; see also the blog post he wrote on weight gain in recovery, inspired by our chat); and on the seductions of anorexia with Hannah Higginbotham for the Full of Beans podcast (2023).
  • Recovery talks at eating-disorder clinics

I also run practical workshops on daily habits (writing-focused or otherwise), on getting your web presence working from your (especially if you’re a student or researcher), and other elements of working and living well. You can find out more on my personal site here.

My past and future academic talks are also listed on my personal site, here.

Testimonials

From a participant in my workshop “Food, bodies, and the wider world”:

I thought it was a great session, and the simple approach of beginning with our thoughts and feelings about the snacks on the table was an inspired way to get straight into some deep thinking about attitudes to food and eating. […] One of the topics I found particularly interesting was your challenge to examine whether there may be underlying motives behind lifestyle choices like vegetarianism. […] All of this prompted some more thinking about why exactly I feel this shame about my appetite, and where I am at with my food and eating right now. […] Your session has prompted an awful lot of reflection, and some tentative action, and I’m very grateful to you for the many ways that you’ve tried to communicate with people about such an enormously complex subject.

From the artist whose North Wall exhibition I spoke at:

Emily Troscianko has star quality. She can take rich and complex ideas, from several different disciplines and directions, and she can turn them into a narrative that is fluent and easy to understand. She has wit, grace, empathy and vivacity, so she can hold an audience’s attention with ease. She can take things seriously without intimidating the listener, and she can use humour with a light touch. Speaking as someone who has directed projects in small spaces and vast halls, on television, radio and internet, I am confident she can work well in all these settings. And Emily writes well too.

Geoff Dunlop   Curator | Producer | Filmmaker | Artist

Please get in touch if you have an idea for an event or project you’d like to explore with me.