Image via The University of Chicago Press website

Coming April 2017 from The University of Chicago Press is Sharrona Pearl’s Face/ On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other. This engaging exploration of face transplantation is the first comprehensive cultural study of the surgical procedure. Using bioethical and medical reports, media coverage, hospital records, personal interviews, and more, this interdisciplinary study discusses the significance we place on facial manipulation, facelessness, reconstruction, identity, and sense of self. Are our identities attached to our faces? If so, what happens when the face connected to the self is gone or replaced? This book will be of interest to medical and psychological anthropologists, bioethicists, medical professionals, those in the media and beauty industries, and cross-disciplinary scholars in the medical humanities.

To learn more about this upcoming release, click here.

About the author: Sharrona Pearl is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a theorist of the face and body, gender and sexuality, disability and critical race theory, and cinema and media studies. She has explored the meaning of the face previously in About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, released in 2010 by Harvard University Press (available here), and is the editor of Images, Ethics, Technology (Routledge, 2016), the latest volume in the Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies series.