Kate Fox

Kate Fox

Kate Fox, co-director of SIRC, is a social anthropologist and bestselling author of popular social science books. She is also a Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Research.

Kate’ work involves research, publications, lectures and broadcasts on many aspects of human behaviour and social relations, including: social and cultural aspects of drinking; flirting and courtship; beauty and body-image; gossip; aggression, disorder and violence; young people’s attitudes and habits; individualism; the social impact of mobile phones; sex differences in risk taking; social aspects of horseracing; health scares and other health issues; celebrations; the psychology of smell and scent; manners and etiquette; the English national character; the meaning of chips.

Kate’s most recent book is the bestseller Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2004, which has sold half a million copies, and is being translated into Chinese, Polish and Russian.

She is also the author of The Racing Tribe: Watching the Horsewatchers(published in the UK by Metro, and in the US — as The Racing Tribe: Portrait of a British Subculture -by Transaction); Passport to the Pub: The Tourists’ Guide to Pub Etiquette (DoNot Press) and Pubwatching with Desmond Morris. Kate is the co-author, with Dr Peter Marsh, of Drinking and Public Disorder (The Portman Group).

Kate is regularly invited to speak at literary festivals, including Hay-on-Wye, Cheltenham, Oxford, Ways with Words, Canterbury, Richmond, etc. — as well as guest lectures at Oxford University, Oxford Brookes, University of Kent, Chatham House, etc. She gave the Christmas Lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in 2005.

She is frequently quoted in the Press and interviewed on radio and television, on all types of programmes, from Radio 4 Today, Radio 3 Nightwaves and BBC4/BBC2/Channel 4 documentaries, to more lightweight interviews with Jeremy Clarkson and Richard and Judy. Kate has also been a regular columnist for Psychologies magazine.

Kate is currently working on her next book, which will examine many aspects of 21st-century life and obsessions - including mobile phones, social media, online dating, shopping, celebrity, reality TV, computer games, selfies, etc - from an evolutionary/anthropological perspective