Fay Bound-Alberti

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 at King's College London, where she is PI of Interface and Director of the Centre for Technology and the Body. She was previously Professor of Modern History at the University of York. Bound-Alberti is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS) and previously Foundation Future Leader at the Foundation for Science and Technology.

Early life and education Fay Bound-Alberti was born in Morecambe, Lancashire and raised in Wales. Her brother is the British Cinematographer Lol Crawley. Fay received her B.A. in History and English from the University of Wales in 1995, after which she completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in history at the University of York (1996–2000). She completed post-doctoral research in history of medicine from 2001 to 2004 at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. She undertook further studies at the Institute for Philanthropy and the London Business School.

Career Bound-Alberti has taught at several British universities including the Open University, University of Lancaster, the University of Manchester and University College London and was one of the founders of the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University. She has interests outside of academia, having been the Head of philanthropy for the Arcadia Foundation, the charitable foundation of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and head of medical humanities grants at the Wellcome Trust. She took up this post at the University of York, where she was Professor in History. In 2023, Bound-Alberti joined King'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 as Interface, a research project into the cultural history of the face, and facial transplantation.

Writing and media Fay Bound-Alberti has written works regarding history, medicine, and emotion. She is known for her works, including Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion (2010), This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (2016), and A Biography of Loneliness: the history of an Emotion. A Biography of Loneliness is currently undergoing translation into multiple languages, including simple and complex Chinese. Notably, Matters of the Heart was shortlisted for the prestigious Longman-History Today Award for Book of the Year, while This Mortal Coil received recognition as a finalist for the BSHS Dingle Prize.

Until 2019 Bound-Alberti was part of the History Girls blogging collective, and has written for The F-Word feminist blog on the intersections between softcore pornography and the modern music video, and for Open Democracy on open access to academic works. She has written several articles on loneliness for Aeon Magazine, The Conversation and The Guardian newspaper and is a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.

Bound-Alberti was interviewed by Julie Beck for The Atlantic Magazine in 2017 on the cultural and psychological history of human perceptions of the heart. Bound-Alberti has appeared on several television and radio programmes to discuss her work, including BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking to discuss This Mortal Coil in 2016 and on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time to discuss the heart in 2006. She also appeared on the Radio 4 series on the heart with the cleric and broadcaster Giles Fraser. On the topic of loneliness, she was interviewed by CBC news, BBC Radio 3 and 4, including BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed, Global News for the Charles Adler show. Bound-Alberti also took part in a video interview with Saprina Panday for Women's Health Interactive. She is a TED speaker, having spoken on loneliness at the TED Summit in Edinburgh, 2019. 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 include What we still don't know about vascularized composite allotransplantation (VCA) outcomes and quality of life measurements and Blueprint for Sustainable Face Transplant Policy and Practice 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.

Based on the findings of a seven-year research project funded by UKRI, Bound-Alberti published a review of the field of face transplants 20 years on in The Guardian.

Selected publications