Lesley A. Sharp

Lesley Sharp holds a PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in English and American Literature and Fine Arts from Brandeis University. After teaching at Butler University, she joined the faculty of Barnard College, where she holds the Barbara Chamberlain & Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30 Professorship of Anthropology. In turn, Sharp is a Senior Research Scientist in Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University, and she teaches part-time for the Bard Prison Initiative. Her research spans the distance from the US to Madagascar; keen interests include suffering and healing; embodied biotech; interspecies care; and mourning and memorialization. Sharp has coedited, with Nancy Chen, Bioinsecurity and Vulnerability, and she is the author of six other books. Her work Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self won the 2008 New Millennium Book Prize of the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA). Sharp holds four separate teaching awards, and in 2019 she was granted the Graduate Student Mentor Award of the Medical Anthropology Student Association of the SMA, as well as the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

Animal Ethos