14 Facts About Silvia Federici

Silvia Federici was born on 1942 and is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York.

Silvia Federici is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor.

Silvia Federici taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria.

In 1990, Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, and, with Ousseina Alidou, was the editor of the CAFA bulletin for over a decade.

Silvia Federici was a member of the Academic Association of Africa Scholars and among the voices generating support for the struggles of students across the African continent and in the United States.

For several decades, Silvia Federici has been working in a variety of projects with feminist organizations across the world like Women in Nigeria, Ni Una Menos, the Argentinian feminist organization, and Feminist research on violence in New York.

Silvia Federici is considered one of the leading feminist theoreticians in Marxist feminist theory, women's history, political philosophy, and the history and theory of the commons.

Silvia Federici moved to the US in 1967 to study for a PhD in philosophy at the University at Buffalo with support from a Fulbright scholarship.

Silvia Federici taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, and was Associate Professor and later Professor of Political Philosophy and International Studies at New College of Hofstra University.

Silvia Federici was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, and an organizer with the wages for housework campaign.

Silvia Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, and was involved with the Midnight Notes Collective.

In March 2022, Silvia Federici was amongst 151 international feminists signing Feminist Resistance Against War: A Manifesto, in solidarity with the Feminist Anti-War Resistance initiated by Russian feminists after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Silvia Federici's best known work, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, expands on the work of Leopoldina Fortunati investigating the reasons for the witch hunts of the early modern period, but giving a feminist interpretation.

Silvia Federici connects this expropriation to women's unpaid labour, both connected to reproduction and otherwise, which she frames as a historical precondition to the rise of a capitalist economy predicated upon wage labor.