About this Event
Hysterical
How we interpret emotions and act on them has been heavily gendered, as far back as Ancient Greek and Roman times, and - despite improvements in societal equality - continues to be today.
In Hysterical, Dr Pragya Agarwal delves into history and science to determine the truth about our notions of innate differences between the male and female experience of emotions. She examines the impact this has on men and women - especially the role it has played in the subjugation of women throughout history - and imagines how a future where emotions are ungendered might look.
Pragya Agarwal
Dr Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural and data scientist and a visiting professor of social inequities and injustice at Loughborough University as well as a visiting scholar at Wolfson College. Following a PhD from the University of Nottingham in the UK, she held the prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship and senior academic positions and visiting fellowships at University College London (UK), University of Temuco (Chile), RMIT (Melbourne), and Johns Hopkins University (USA). She was awarded a Crucible fellowship by NESTA for ‘innovative interdisciplinary research’, and a Transmission Prize in 2022 for ‘making big complex scientific ideas accessible’. In 2023-24, she has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship at University of California-Irvine.
Pragya is the author of four widely acclaimed non-fiction books, Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias (Bloomsbury, 2020) which was Guardian Book of the Week, Wish We Knew What To Say: Talking With Children about Race (Dialogue Books, 2020), and (M)otherhood: On the choices of being a woman (Canongate, 2021). Her latest book, Hysterical: Exploding the myth of gendered emotions, a historical and scientific analysis of emotions, is one of Waterstones, Telegraph and i paper’s 'best non-fiction books of 2022'. Her writing has also appeared in Guardian, Prospect, BBC Science Focus, Scientific American, WIRED and New Scientist amongst others, and her creative non-fiction in literary magazines such as Literary Hub, Florida Review and AEON. Pragya teaches creative non-fiction writing courses for Arvon and Irish Writers Centre.
Pragya has been invited to speak around the world including Hay Festival, Cheltenham Festival, UNFPA, Museum of Science Boston, British Academy, amongst others. In 2023, she was invited to headline the M/OTHER festival at The Wheeler Centre (Melbourne) and speak at the All About Women festival at the Sydney Opera House.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Blackwell's Bookshop, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford, United Kingdom
GBP 5.00
