Dr Francesca Brencio PhD

• Executive Committee Member of The Royal College of Psychiatrists - Special Interest Group in Philosophy (UK)
• Member of the Phenomenology and Mental Health Network at The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice in Health and Social Care at the St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford (UK)

Education

BA in Theology, Theological Institute in Assisi associated to Pontificia Universitas Lateranensis (PUL), Italy

PhD in Philosophy and Human Sciences, Università degli Studi di Perugia, Italy

BA (Hons. – 5 years degree course) in Philosophy, Università degli Studi di Perugia, Italy

Dr. Brencio joined the University of Birmingham in 2024 as Teaching Fellow in Mental Health. She studied Philosophy at University of Perugia (Italy) and Theology at the Theological Institute in Assisi associated to Pontificia Universitas Lateranensis (Vatican City).

She was a post-doctoral researcher at the Western Sydney University (Australia) and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Germany). For the Winter Semester 2017 she was Visiting Professor in the USA at the Hillsdale College (Michigan), Wisconsin University, and The SUNY in Buffalo. From 2018 to 2024 she was Associate Researcher in Philosophy in the frame of the Research Group “Filosofía Aplicada: Sujeto, Sufrimiento, Sociedad” at the University of Seville (Spain). In 2021

Dr. Brencio was awarded The Seal of Excellence by the European Commission, as the institution managing Horizon 2020, in the frame of EU Programme for Research and Innovation 2014-2020. In January 2022 she joined the Philosophy of Psychiatry Educators Network, of the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry. She is the Director of the PhenoLab - A theoretical laboratory on Phenomenology and Mental Health.

Dr Brencio is involved in teaching activities for the MSc Mental Health for on-campus and distance-learning students.

Scholar of the German tradition of phenomenology, especially of Martin Heidegger, her works are aimed to the exploration of the methodological and epistemological contributions that phenomenology and hermeneutics provide to psychiatry, in order to achieve a better understanding of mental health.

Dr. Brencio works primarily in the field of phenomenological psychopathology and philosophy of psychiatry, with a focus on themes such as perception, attention, emotions (individual and social emotions), affective life, and the role of the body. The aim of her research is mainly related to eliciting the subjective dimension of some psychopathological experiences, i.e., depression and schizophrenia, using phenomenological informed interviews. She is among the editors of the Handbook of Phenomenology, Values-based Practice and Shared Decision-Making in Personalised Mental Health Care: Contemporary Approaches and Challenges (Springer-Nature, Cham, expected for 2025), and she is among the contributors of The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2019), Storia della Fenomenologia Clinica (UTET, Torino 2020), and APA Handbook of Humanistic and Existential Psychology (American Philosophical Association Press, in press).