About

Stefania
Pandolfo

anthropologist

Stefania Pandolfo is an ethnographic researcher, writer, and anthropologist. Pandolfo is professor and advisor of the Medical Anthropology Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Pandolfo brings an anthropological perspective that incorporates contemporary philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, and her field research in a Moroccan psychiatric hospital. Pandolfo aims to link medical anthropology and recent social theories of melancholy, memory, and trauma, by focusing on ethnographies of madness and healing in a time of global upheaval. Pandolfo studies forms of subjectivity and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle East. She investigates intercultural approaches to different ontologies and systems of knowledge, modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, madness, and mental illness. Her current project is a study of emergent forms of subjectivity in Moroccan modernity at the interface of “traditional therapies” and psychiatry. Pandolfo is the author of Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory, 1997, and Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam, 2018. Pandolfo lives and works in Berkeley, CA.