Search the faculty site
For media inquiries or to contact a faculty expert, please contact Media Relations:
Phone: 212.854.2037
Email: mediarelations@barnard.edu
Sun Min
Director of Media Relations
Alyssa Vine
Associate Director of Media Relations
LESLEY A. SHARP
Professor of Anthropology
Lesley Sharp is a professor of anthropology at Barnard College and a senior research scientist in sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
As a medical anthropologist by training, Professor Sharp is most concerned with critical analyses of the symbolics of the human body, where her research sites range from cosmopolitan medical centers within the United States to urban centers in sub-Saharan Africa. From 1986 until 1995, her work as an Africanist was based in a polycultural plantation community of northwest Madagascar, where initial research addressed spirit mediumship and the gendered nature of healing. She later returned to the same site in the mid-1990s to examine other forms of affliction, most notably the effects of the state's short-lived socialist project in shaping the historical and political consciousness of Malagasy school youth.
In 1991, she initiated research focusing on organ transplantation, procurement, and donation in the United States. Key foci include medical ideologies, body commodification, and the transformative properties of organ transplants specifically in reference to the social construction of the self. Her current research focuses on scientists engaged in generating new, non-human sources of transplantable organs, including mechanical heart devices and xenotransplantation (where animals, and more particularly swine, define potential sources of usable parts). This project is most concerned with how scientists imagine the promises and moral consequences of their work. Lesley Sharp is the recipient of numerous external grants and three teaching awards.
Selected Publications
Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Real of Human Organ Transfer (Columbia University Press 2007, based on the 2004 Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures)
Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self (University of California Press, 2006); awarded the 2008 New Millennium Book Award by the Society for Medical Anthropology.
The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar (University of California Press, 2002)
The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town (University of California Press, 1993)
212.854.5428
lsharp@barnard.edu
EDUCATION:
Ph.D., Joint Degree: University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, San Francisco
M.A., University of California, BerkeleyB.A., Brandeis University
RELATED LINKS:
SPECIALIZATIONS:
Anthropology and bioethics
Symbolics of the human body
Youth and identity politics
Africa, including Madagascar
Human organ transfer
Body commodification