Francesca Campani

Francesca Campani is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the MacMillan Center, where she is hosted by Professor Paola Bertucci, with a project entitled “OBSEX – Objects of Pleasure: The Contribution of Anthropological Material Culture to the Emergence of Sexual Science. (1870-1940)”. She received her PhD in Modern History in 2021 from the University of Lincoln (UK) and the University of Padua (IT), where she is co-coordinator of the Storie di sessualità e genere working group. Her research focuses on the history of sexuality and sexual science, particularly on the development and circulation of cultural and scientific discourses on sexual pleasure between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work has been published in international journals, including Social History of Medicine and Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science. In 2025, she published her first monograph, La scienza del piacere. Paolo Mantegazza e lo sviluppo dei saperi scientifici sulla sessualità nell’Italia dell’Ottocento [The Science of Pleasure: Paolo Mantegazza and the Emergence of Scientific Knowledge on Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Italy] (Unicopli).