Lesley A. Sharp

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Lesley A. Sharp, a medical anthropologist, is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and a senior research scientist in sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Her work focuses on forms of embodiment, subjectivity, body commodification, and the transformative processes associated with spirit possession in Madagascar, human organ transfer, and highly experimental realms of clinical science involving human and animal research subjects.

Sharp is writing a book that analyzes, from an anthropological perspective, interspecies cohabitation in experimental medical science, especially laboratory scientists’ informal and private understandings of the moral use of mammalian species as research subjects. Whereas codified, bioethical frameworks most certainly guide work within laboratories, this work draws on Sharp’s long-term ethnographic interest in the equally rich yet poorly understood realm of “everyday ethics,” most evident in the creative, serendipitous, and unorthodox thoughts and actions employed by scientists.

Sharp holds a PhD in medical anthropology from the joint programs at the Universities of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. She is the author of five books. Her book Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self (University of California Press, 2006) won the Society for Medical Anthropology's New Millennium Book Award. Her most recent books are The Transplant Imaginary: Mechanical Hearts, Animal Parts, and Moral Thinking in Highly Experimental Science University of California Press, 2014), alongside Bioinsecurity and Vulnerability (School for Advanced Research Press, 2014), coedited with Nancy Chen. Sharp is the recipient of four teaching awards.