Angelica Ferrara
Angelica Ferrara, PhD, is a developmental and social psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she is a British Academy early career fellow. Her work explores how gender norms shape social and emotional development, specifically relationships. Ferrara’s first book, Men Without Men, explores how cultural conceptions of manhood became incongruent with men’s needs for close, intimate bonds, leading many men to report that they have very few or no close friends. Drawing on the voices of men and boys interviewed during her time as a postdoctoral fellow at The Clayman Institute, Ferrara uncovers how the state of men’s friendships in the Global North became so fractured, who pays the price for men’s social isolation, and how these dynamics can be disrupted. Men Without Men will be published by Simon & Schuster in the United States and Penguin Random House in the United Kingdom and Canada. Ferrara's research paper with Clayman Institute research assistant Dylan Vergara coined the term mankeeping, the labor that some women take on to sustain men’s social lives and emotional wellbeing, often by compensating for the relative thinness of men’s social networks. Her research and writing have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Scientific American, The Economist, Forbes, The Washington Post, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, among others.