Carol Ferrara

Carol Ferrara is a sociocultural anthropologist and assistant professor in the Marketing Communication Department at Emerson College. Drawing upon her diverse academic and professional expertise in anthropology, diversity, pluralism, religion, education, and business, her teaching in Marketing Communication encourages students to explore the ways that the social sciences can be leveraged to help make marketing and business better, smarter, and more socially and environmentally responsible.

Her research has focused on religion in secular societies, and most prominently, the ways that Muslims and Catholics navigate and negotiate faith, plurality, ethics, and national identity in secular France. Her debut book Muslim and Catholic experiences of French national belonging: rethinking boundaries, inequities, and faith in the Republic is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic as part of the Islam in the West Series. She has published multiple articles and book chapters about private Muslim schooling in France. During the 2019-2020 academic year, Carol was awarded the Fulbright-EHESS Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue new ethnographic research about independent private schooling in France.

Carol holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Boston University, a dual MA in Middle East & Islamic Studies and International Affairs from the American University in Paris, and a BS in International Business from the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is a co-Chair of the American Academy of Religion’s “Religion in Europe” Program Unit. 

At Emerson, Carol teaches Human-Centric Marketing & Social Responsibility (DD603); Global Cultures: Applied Anthropology and Sociology for Marketing (MK665); Communication, Media and Society (MK120); and The Responsibility Ladder: People, power & policy (BC609), and has previously taught courses on Islam (HI204 and RL115), and Religion and secularism in contemporary societies (SO310).