Tiffany Watt Smith is a cultural historian who writes about the social forces that shape our most intimate worlds. She is Reader (Emerita) at Queen Mary University of London, where she directed the Centre for the History of Emotions. She is author of Bad Friend: On Joyous, Imperfect Love (UK Faber/US Celadon/Macmillan, 2025), Schadenfreude (2018) and The Book of Human Emotions (2015) (both UK: Profile/Wellcome, and US: Little, Brown). Her writing has been translated into twelve languages.
She is a BBC-AHRC New Generation Thinker, a TED-speaker and a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, and her writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Financial Times, and The Atlantic among others. Her research has been generously supported by grants from Wellcome Trust, AHRC and the British Academy, and in 2019 she was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize. While a visiting scholar at the OCLW, Tiffany will be developing a ficto-history project about a group of young female factory workers in 1930s Chicago.
