Marisa G. Franco, PhD, author portrait
© Dr. Darren Agboh, Ph.D., Photographer and Social Psychologist

Marisa G. Franco, PhD

Dr. Marisa G. Franco holds a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Maryland and works as a professor there currently. She writes for Psychology Today and she has been a featured psychologist in The New York Times, NPR, and Good Morning America. Dr. Franco delivers talks about connection and belonging all over the country to private companies, universities, and non-profit organizations.
Platonic

Books

Platonic

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2024-25

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2024-25 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 340 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2024-25. We will continue to update this

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2025 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2025! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about science, technology, history, student success, the environment, public health, and current events, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through the pages,

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Marisa G. Franco, PhD’s Platonic

How do we make and keep friends in an era of distraction, burnout, and chaos, especially in a society that often prizes romantic love at the expense of other relationships? In Platonic, Dr. Marisa G. Franco unpacks the latest, often counterintuitive findings about the bonds between us—for example, why your friends aren’t texting you back (it’s

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