Associate Professor of Medical EthicsSharrona Pearl is Associate Professor of Medical Ethics in the Department of Heath Administration at Drexel University and affiliated faculty at the Center for Science, Technology & Society. A historian and theory of the body and face, Pearl researches the relationship between the face and how we perceived people. She has explored the face in a number of articles and two monographs: About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard University Press, 2010) and Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (University of Chicago Press, 2017). She is also the editor of Images, Ethics, Technology (Routledge, 2016), the latest volume in the Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies series. Her current research explores the face recognition spectrum from face blindness to super recognition. She is also writing an article on prison plastic surgery programs internationally. Other areas of interest include critical race, gender, and disability studies; media studies, science and performance; freak shows through history; and the ethics of images.
Dr. Pearl previously was an Assistant Professor at The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature and in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, and received the Swann Foundation Fellowship for Caricature and Cartoon at the Library of Congress. She has served as the keynote speaker for the Kern Conference in Visual Communication and the Geddes W. Simpson Memorial Lecturer at the University of Maine.