Dr Francesca Mezzenzana

Dr Francesca Mezzenzana is a social anthropologist with an interest in Latin America, especially the Ecuadorian Amazon, where she has been carrying out fieldwork since 2011. Francesca received a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BSc in Anthropology from University College London. Before coming to Kent she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale of the Collège de France.

Dr Mezzenzana's research interests span a variety of topics, including the anthropology of Amazonia, embodiment and phenomenological anthropology, human-nonhuman relationships, perception and the development of attention, pottery-making and material culture, and the anthropology of learning and childhood. At Kent, Francesca is developing a new project which looks at the way children in the Ecuadorian Amazon learn to perceive nonhumans as animate and develop an ‘empathy’ towards them.

Dr Mezzenzana recently organised a two-day research event, Conversations on Empathy: An Interdisciplinary Encounter.