Keith Oatley was born in London, England. He was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, where he was awarded a First in Psychology. After beginning to train in medicine, he did a PhD in Psychology at University College London, and then completed a post-doctoral year in Engineering in Medicine at Imperial College, London. After working at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory’s Autonomics Division, he took up a post as Lecturer in the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex, and during leaves from Sussex he put in stints in the Committee of Mathematical Biology, University of Chicago, and Department of Psychology, University of Toronto. After Sussex, he spent four and a half years as Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Glasgow before moving to Toronto in 1990 to take up a post as Professor of Applied Cognitive Psychology. His principal appointment is in the Dept. of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto, of which he was Chair from 1999-2002. He is now Professor Emeritus. He is a former President of the International Society for Research on Emotions, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has three children, Simon, Grant, and Hannah (all now grown up), and he lives in Toronto with his wife, Jennifer Jenkins, who is a developmental psychologist. Among Keith Oatley’s interests have been research in physiological psychology, visual perception, artificial intelligence human-computer interaction, & epidemiological psychiatry. He has trained as a psychotherapist with the Philadelphia Association, London, UK, and has also worked as a free-lance science journalist. During the last twenty years his principal research has been on human emotions and the influence of adversity on emotional disorders such as depression. During the last ten years he has also conducted research on the cognitive and emotional processes of reading and writing fiction. He is the author of more than 150 journal articles and chapters, six books of psychology, which include Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions (1992) and (with Dacher Keltner and Jennifer Jenkins) Understanding Emotions, Second Edition (2006). Keith Oatley is also the author of two novels. The first, The Case of Emily V., in which Freud and Sherlock Holmes work on the same case in 1904, won the 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel. The novel revolves round three relationships, and is told in three voices. It has been translated into French, German, and Japanese. His second novel, A Natural History (1998) has been translated into French. It is an interior portrait, set in 1849, of the workings of the mind of a scientist as he strives to solve the problem that is still the most important in medicine: the nature of infectious disease. It is an exploration, too, of the relationship of the researcher with his wife, a pianist. The novel traces ways in which love affects work, and work affects love. The common themes of this research and writing include furthering our understandings of interactions within complex systems, especially complex social systems. Keith Oatley’s theories of fiction include the idea that novels are simulations that run not on computers but on minds. His novels, then, are ways of enabling people to experience psychological issues as they read. He would like to be able to see beneath the surface of things. |