College of Arts and Sciences

Education:

• PhD, History of Science, Harvard University, 2005
• BA (hons.) York University, 1999

Curriculum Vitae:

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Research Interests:

• Health humanities
• Interdisciplinary historian and theorist of the face
• Media and religion
• Critical race, gender, and disability studies
• Museums, collective, and archives

Bio:

Sharrona Pearl is a historian and theorist of the face and body. A highly interdisciplinary scholar, Pearl has published widely on Victorian history of medicine, media and religion, and critical race, gender, and disability studies. She has a book forthcoming in the fall with Johns Hopkins University Press entitled Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Super Recognition. This is the third in her face trilogy, following Face/On: FaceTransplants and the Ethics of the Other (Chicago UP: 2015) and About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard UP: 2010). She is currently writing a book on "The Mask" under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. Pearl maintains an active freelance profile, with bylines in a variety of newspapers and magazines including The Washington Post, Lilith, and Real Life Magazine. Pearl teaches courses across colleges at Drexel and strives to bring hands-on historical and ethics training to the classroom through creative pedagogy and community-based learning. She has served on the DEI Board of CNHP and currently sits on the Health Professions Equity Board at Drexel. Pearl is the co-editor of the Health Humanities series at Johns Hopkins University Press and sits on the editorial board of a number of journals in the field.

Selected Publications:

BOOKS

• Do I Know You: From Face Blindness to Super Recognition, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023.
• Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other, University of Chicago Press, 2017.
• Images, Ethics, Technology, edited volume, Routledge, October 2015.
• About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Harvard University Press, February 2010.

REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES

• “Introduction: Theorizing and Applying the Meaningfully Anecdotal Patient in Neurodiversity Research,” Notes and Research special issue, Sharrona Pearl, ed., 76:4 (December 2022), 1-5. Available at: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0083
• “Is There Dyslexia Without Reading?” Disability Studies Quarterly 42:1 (August 2022). Available at: https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/8184/7596.
• “COVID Mask Wearing: Identity and Materiality,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (EASTS), coauthored with Scott Knowles and Rashawn Ray, 16:1 (2022), 117-123.
• “Change Your Face, Change Your Life?: Prison Plastic Surgery as a way to Reduce Recidivism,” Journal for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 77: 2 (April 2022), 217-246.
• “Digital Collection: COVID-19 Vaccine Public Service Announcements (PSAs),” Advertising & Society Quarterly, 22:4 (2021). Available at muse.jhu.edu/article/845383.
• “#sorrynotsorry: a teaching module on advertising gaffes in the digital age,” ASQ, 21:2 (2020).
• “Staying Angry: Black women’s resistance to racialized forgiveness in US police shootings,” Women’s Studies in Communication, 43:3 (2020), 271-291. DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2020.1744208
• “Deglamming as Estrangement: Ugly in Monster, The Hours, and Cake,” Cinema Journal 8:1 (2020) 218-248. Available at: http://cinej.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cinej/article/view/268/545
• “A Super Useless Super Hero: The Positive Framing of Super Recognition,” Semiotic Review, 7, Sept. 2019. Available at: https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/41
• “Saving Faces,” Canadian Medical Association Journal, 190:16 (23 April 2018) E511-E512. Translated into Persian on 18 September 2022 at: https://ethicshouse.ir/آیا-پیوند-صورت،-هویت-فرد-را-تغییر-مید/
• “Victorian Blockbuster Bodies and the Freakish Pleasure of Looking,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 38:2 (2016) 93-106.
• “Bodies of Digital Celebrity,” with Dana Polan, Public Culture, 27:175 (January 2015) 185-192.
• “The Image is (Not) the Event: Negotiating the Pedagogy of Controversial Events,” with Alexandra Sastre, Visual Communication Quarterly, 21:4 2014, 198-209.
• “Exceptions to the Rule: Chabad-Lubavitch and the Digital Sphere,” Journal of Media and Religion, 13:3, 2014.
• “Teaching Atrocity Without Images” AfterImage, 40:6 (May/June 2013) 16-20.
• Visual Studies Section Guest Editor, special edition on “The Queer in the Clinic,” Journal of Medical Humanities 34:2 (June 2013) 299-300.
• “Invictus as Coronation: Creating and Exporting a King,” in Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 12:1(January-April 2012), 138-145.
• “Neither Black Nor White: Drawing Irish-Americans,” “Éire-Ireland, 44:3&4 (Fall/Winter 2009) 171-199.
• “Through a Mediated Mirror: The Photographic Physiognomy of Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond,” History of Photography, 33:3 (August 2009) 288-305.
• “Building Beauty: Physiognomy on the Gas-Lit Stage,” Endeavour, 30:3 (September 2006) 84-89.

BOOK CHAPTERS

• “Ugliness as Disfigurement in Life and Loves of the She-Devil and Flavor of the Month,” The Disfigured Face in American Literature, Film, and Television. Cornelia Klecker and Gudrun M. Grabher, ed. New York: Routledge, 2022, 59-76.
• “Facing the Weight of God’s Glory: Exodus 33 and the Face-to-Face,” Reading Exodus. Beth Kissileff, ed. London: Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming.
• “Watching While (Face) Blind: Clone Layering and Prosopagnosia,” Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics. Andrea Goulet and Robert Rushing, ed. London: Intellect Books, 2018, 77-92.
• “Dazed and Abused: Gender and Mesmerism in Wilkie Collins’ A Woman in White and The Moonstone,” Victorian Literary Mesmerism. Martin Wills and Catherine Wynne, ed. New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, 163-182.