Professor Laurie Taylor’s career has involved stints as a teacher, a salesman, an actor and as Professor of Sociology at the University of York. His work on Radio Four includes Stop the Week, The Afternoon Shift, The Radio Programme and Room for Improvement. For the last fourteen years, he has presented the weekly social science programme, Thinking Allowed.
His work for television includes documentaries on the sixties student revolution, criminal statistics, drinking behaviour, and the pain of death and dying. He has recently completed sixty editions of the Sky Arts interview series In Confidence. His books include Psychological Survival (with Stan Cohen), Escape Attempts (with Stan Cohen) and most recently In Confidence: Talking Frankly About Fame.
He is currently President of the Rationalist Association, a Fellow of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences, and holds honorary degrees from eight UK universities. HIs weekly satirical column on university life has been appearing in the Times Higher Education for the last 35 years.
He is a Fellow of Birkbeck College, University of London, where he is also visiting professor in the department of politics and sociology.