Anna Katharina Schaffner is a writer, coach and professor of cultural history at the University of Kent in the UK. She is also a member of the research collective Perspectiva and a fellow at the Hamburg Institute of Advanced Studies. Her books include Modernism and Perversion (2012) and Exhaustion: A History (2016), and she has just completed a history of the ancient art of self-improvement, which will be published by Yale University Press later this year.