Lesley A. Sharp

Lesley A. Sharp is an American medical anthropologist. She is the Barbara Chamberlain & Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30 Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College.^[1]

Sharp earned her B.A. from Brandeis University, M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a joint Ph.D. in medical anthropology from Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco.^[1] She taught at Butler University before joining Barnard's faculty.

Sharp's early research focused on the daily and economic struggles of migrants and locals in a plantation economy in Northwestern Madagascar.^[1] Since 1990, her work has focused on the ethical and moral consequences of innovative medicine and science, especially in the organ transplantation industry, and human-animal relations in experimental laboratory research.^[2]

Sharp earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in anthropology and cultural studies in 2020.^[3] She also received the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems in 2018 from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.^[4][5]