One of four young sociologists who joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in the years after the Second World War, John Manfredi carried the entire load of teaching theory from 1948 to 1967. A native of Philadelphia and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (BA 1942), Manfredi came to Amherst after completing his MA at Harvard in 1948, teaching while simultaneously completing a dissertation on "The Relationship of Class-Structured Pathologies to the Contents of Popular Periodical Fiction, 1936-1940" (Harvard, 1951).

A specialist in social theory and cultural systems, Manfredi taught both sociology and anthropology for several years as his interests evolved from a focus on class and social pathology to Italian sociological theory to the sociology of religion and art. A valued mentor and inspiring teacher, he wrote two monographs: Periodical Resources in Italian Sociology (1977) and his best known work, The Social Limits of Art (1982). Manfredi retired from teaching in 1985 and died in February 1993.

The John Manfredi collection contains a suite of articles and class essays from his days as a graduate student in sociology at Harvard and his early years on faculty at UMass Amherst. Reflecting his training in theory and his developing interest in the sociology of art, the collection also includes a handful of unpublished works and a particularly interesting set of notes on classes taken by Manfredi in the mid-1940s under eminent figures such as Talcott Parsons, Carle C. Zimmerman, and P.A. Sorokin.