About
Angelica is a psychologist, a writer, a teacher, and a feminist.
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.
Dr. Angelica Ferrara is a developmental and social psychologist whose work investigates how gender norms shape our capacity for closeness. She studies what happens to our relationships, our communities, and ourselves when those norms fail us. A British Academy Early Career Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, she examines the social forces that govern how we experience connection and relationships, tracing how expectations about masculinity and femininity influence the shape of our social networks stretching from childhood friendships to adult romantic intimacy.
Before joining LSE, Ferrara completed her doctorate at New York University and was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University from 2022 to 2025 where she remains an Affiliate Scholar. Ferrara’s forthcoming 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 for Gender Research at Stanford, Ferrara uncovers how the state of men’s friendships in the Global North became so fractured and what society—and women—stand to gain from solving the problem of male isolation. Men Without Men will be published by Simon & Schuster in the United States and Penguin Random House in the United Kingdom and Canada, along with translations internationally in Japan, France, Spain, Germany, and others.
Ferrara’s research paper in Psychology of Men and Masculinities with 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. Ferrara’s research has covered a wide array of topics related to how gender norms shape the world, from why boys lose interest in jobs society codes as “feminine” to the factors that shape men’s intentions to engage in gender equality work.
Raised in Virginia, Angelica started her journey in academia at Blue Ridge Community College. She now lives in London.
