Fay Bound Alberti (born 1971) is a British writer and cultural historian of gender, emotion and medicine. Since 2023 she has been Professor of Modern History and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow atKing's College London, where she is PI ofInterface and Director of theCentre for Technology and the Body. She was previously Professor of Modern History at theUniversity of York. Bound Alberti is a Fellow of theRoyal Historical Society (FRHistS) and previously Foundation Future Leader at theFoundation for Science and Technology.
Fay Bound Alberti was born inMorecambe, Lancashire and raised in Wales. Her brother is the British CinematographerLol Crawley. Fay received her B.A. in History and English from theUniversity of Wales in 1995, after which she completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in history at theUniversity of York (1996–2000). She has won more than £3 million in research funding and has completed post-doctoral research inhistory of medicine from 2001 to 2004 at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine atUniversity College London. She undertook further studies at theInstitute for Philanthropy and theLondon Business School.
Bound Alberti has taught at several British universities including theOpen University,University of Lancaster, theUniversity of Manchester andUniversity College London and was one of the founders of theCentre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University.[1] She has interests outside of academia, having been the Head of philanthropy for theArcadia Foundation, the charitable foundation ofLisbet Rausing andPeter Baldwin, and head of medical humanities grants at theWellcome Trust.[1] In 2019 she was named by the MP Chris Skidmore as one of the firstUK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellows, to pursue her research into the cultural history and emotions of face transplants as part of the AboutFace project.[2][3] She took up this post at the University of York, where she was Professor in History.[4] In 2023, Bound Alberti joinedKing's College London as Professor of Modern History and Director of the Centre for Technology and the Body. The AboutFace project has entered its second phase asInterface, a research project into the cultural history of the face, and facial transplantation.
Fay Bound Alberti is an accomplished author and academic who specialises in history, medicine, and emotion. She is known for her insightful works, includingMatters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion (2010),This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (2016),[5] andABiography of Loneliness: the history of an Emotion.[6]A Biography of Loneliness is currently undergoing translation into multiple languages, including simple and complex Chinese.[7] Notably,Matters of the Heart was shortlisted for the prestigious Longman History Today award for Book of the Year,[8] whileThis Mortal Coil received recognition as a finalist for the BSHS Dingle Prize.[9]
Until 2019 Bound Alberti was part of the History Girls blogging collective,[10] and has written forThe F-Word feminist blog on the intersections betweensoftcore pornography and the modernmusic video,[11] and for Open Democracy on open access to academic works.[12] She has written several articles on loneliness forAeon Magazine,[13] The Conversation[14] andThe Guardian newspaper[15][16] and is a reviewer for theTimes Literary Supplement.
Bound Alberti was interviewed by Julie Beck forThe Atlantic Magazine in 2017 on the cultural and psychological history of human perceptions of the heart.[17] Bound Alberti has appeared on several television and radio programmes to discuss her work, includingBBC Radio 3'sFree Thinking to discussThis Mortal Coil in 2016 and onBBC Radio 4'sIn Our Time to discuss theheart in 2006.[18][19] She also appeared on the Radio 4 series on the heart with the cleric and broadcasterGiles Fraser.[20] On the topic of loneliness, she was interviewed by CBC news, BBC Radio 3 and 4, including BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed,[21] Global News for the Charles Adler show.[22] Bound Alberti also took part in a video interview with Saprina Panday forWomen's Health Interactive.[23] She is aTED speaker, having spoken on loneliness at the TED Summit in Edinburgh, 2019.[24] Fay is an outspoken critic of the medicalization of loneliness without reference to its social, economic and historical origins, especially during the 2019-2021 pandemic.
Since 2022, Bound Alberti has contributed to several international debates on the ethics of facial transplantation as a form of Vascularized Composite Allografts (VCA). Her articles includeWhat we still don't know about vascularized composite allotransplantation (VCA) outcomes and quality of life measurements andBlueprint for Sustainable Face Transplant Policy and Practice[25] and'International consensus recommendations on Face Transplantation: A 2-step Delphi study''. She argues that arts and humanities are needed to understand and inform scientific innovation.
Bound Alberti's new book on the face will be published in 2025 and is under contract with Penguin Press. Her literary agent Is Adam Gauntlett atPeters, Fraser + Dunlop.
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