Biography

After a Master Degree in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Turin, Federica Manfredi started her militant approach to anthropology in Switzerland working in Agridea for the visibility of local farmers, the defense of women and children rights and the prevention of suicides. Upon return to Italy she received a post-master degree in Migration and Psychopathology developing a research on meanings associated to death. In 2014 she published her first monograph “I volti celati di Civitavecchia. Un'antropologa sulle tracce del Venerdì Santo” about the trance experienced by penitents during Holy Friday and, between two kids, she was awarded a grant for her doctoral project on body suspensions in contemporary Europe.

Federica Manfredi completed her PhD degree in Medical Anthropology at the Institute of Social Sciences - University of Lisbon (2022), founded the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia to explore European suspensions as non-therapeutic body modifications with co-participated and experimental qualitative methodologies. The multi-sited ethnography in Norway, Portugal, Italy and Facebook groups become a Berghahn Books monograph in 2024 Beyond Pain. The Anthropology of Body Suspensions.

Member of the project Excel-The Pursuit of Excellence, she provided outreaching activities with the workshop series The Hacked Barbie, and she was member of the organizing committee of the art exhibition “Be F**King Perfect” (Lisbon, 15th September - 16th October 2022), curated by Chiara Pussetti. 

From 2023 she is post-doc fellow at the University of Torino exploring the stigma of vulvar pain conditions and developing multi-sensory approaches for the data collection and the restitution of scientific results to the public beyond the academy. In February 2024 she translated the results of her research The Cloth of Pain into an artistic-scientific exhibition Vulvar Pain. Art. Science. Resistance, funded by the department of Culture, Politics and Society of the University of Torino as public engagament activity. The inauguration at the Campus Luigi Einaudi was characterized by public attention and the exhibition started to travel to expand her range of influence. Today she is creative and scientific curator of the travelling exhibition in Piedmont Region.