Francisco Ferrandiz got his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley in 1996, and is currently Staff Researcher in the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology (ILLA) of the Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CCHS) at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).
His research in the anthropology of the body, violence and social memory (both in Latin America and in Spain) encompasses two main ethnographic objects: the spiritist cult of María Lionza in Venezuela and, since 2003, the politics of memory in contemporary Spain, focusing the analysis on the current process of exhumation of mass graves from the Civil War (1936-1939), which started around 2000.
Before being hired at CSIC, he has taught and conducted research at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Virginia, the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), the University of Utrecht, the Autonomous University of Morelos (UAEM), the University of Deusto and the University of Extremadura.
He is presently Main Researcher of the research project The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain: A Decade of Mass Grave Exhumations, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (CSO2009-09681) and more recently by the Ministry of Economy (CSO2012-32709). He is also the CSIC coordinator of the VII FP Marie Curie Initial Training Network ‘Sustainable Peace Building’ (SBUILD). More recently, he became part of the Management Committee of the COST action called In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe.
In terms of publishing, he is the author of Escenarios del cuerpo: Espiritismo y sociedad en Venezuela (2004), Etnografías contemporáneas (2011), and Exhumar la derrota: Fosas comunes del Siglo XXI en España (in press). He is also co-editor of The Emotion and the Truth: Studies in Mass Communication and Conflict (2002), Before Emergency: Conflict Prevention and the Media (2003), Violencias y culturas (2003), Jóvenes sin tregua: Culturas y políticas de la violencia (2005), Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Peace and Conflict Research (2007), Fontanosas 1941-2006: Memorias de carne y hueso (2010), among others.