Angelica Puzio Ferrara, PhD, is a developmental and social psychologist. She is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and a postdoctoral scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, where her writing and research seek to understand how gender ideologies manifest in behaviour and relationships.
Ferrara’s research is split into two primary streams. In the first, she studies how racialised and classed gender norms affect social and emotional wellbeing. At Stanford, she is working on a book that examines boys’ and men’s friendships across history and cultures. This work illuminates how cultural conceptions of manhood became incongruent with men’s needs for close and intimate bonds, uncovering how the state of men’s friendships became so fractured, who pays the price for men’s social isolation, and how these dynamics can be disrupted. In her second stream of research, she investigates ideological influences on the gendered economy of work. For example, Ferrara’s research in Psychology of Men and Masculinities has addressed why gender disparities persist in occupations that have been culturally deemed “feminine,” such as early childhood education, healthcare, and social care roles.
Prior to joining the ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳, Ferrara completed her Ph.D. at New York University where she was part of the global fellowship program at NYU’s London centre. She also holds a BA from Loyola University and a MA from Wake Forest University. Ferrara's writing on the intersection of gender and culture has been published in The Washington Post and FiveThirtyEight, and her work has been featured by The Economist and The American Psychological Association.