Tiffany Watt Smith

Tiffany Watt Smith's books explore emotions, friendship, bodily reactions, performance, cultural history, and the changing words used to describe feeling. The Book of Human Emotions gathers varied emotional concepts, showing that experience is named and organized differently across places and periods. Schadenfreude focuses on the uncomfortable pleasure found in another person's misfortune.

Bad Friend turns toward friendship, gender, and the ways relationships can carry both solidarity and conflict. On Flinching examines a bodily response at the meeting point of theatricality and scientific observation. Across these works, Watt Smith treats emotion as more than a private interior state: feeling is shaped by language, social expectation, the body, and histories of looking.