Fay Bound Alberti

Writer/Editor

I am a cultural historian, whose specialisms include the histories of science, gender, medicine and emotion. I am interested in how scientific, religious and philosophical beliefs help shape ideas about the body, gender and identity - now and in the past. I was a co-founder of the first Centre for the History of Emotions in Europe, at Queen Mary University of London, where I remain Honorary Senior Research Fellow. I have worked at a senior level in funding, as Head of Philanthropy for the Arcadia Fund and Head of Medical Humanities Grants for the Wellcome Trust. In 2019 I became one of the first cohort of UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders, winning a prestigious seven-year grant to undertake interdisciplinary research into the cultural and emotional history of face transplants. My books include Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion (2010) and This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (2016). My new book on the history of loneliness - A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion - will be published in 2019.

feminism, equality, history

Emotions are historically and culturally situated. Which means they can change over time. Beliefs about the body, identity and the self are similarly historically and culturally situated. History can tell us how beliefs about emotions and the body and gender come into being, how they are normalised through science, religion or medicine, and what impact this has on society in the present.