Sharrona Pearl (May 3, 1977) is a Canadian-American historian and theorist of the face and writer who teaches at Drexel University.
[2] Pearl has written several articles (both scholarly and popular) exploring the role of the face as a cultural object and the framework for human relationships and communication.
She focuses on critical race, gender, sexuality, and disability studies to understand how we make sense of the faces of others and what that says about ourselves.
[3][4][5][6] Pearl’s first book, About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain,[7] explored the history of physiognomy, the study of facial features and their relationship to character; when an interviewer asked her to read his face, Pearl quipped that if she studied the history of obstetrics, she would not be asked to deliver his baby.
[9] A review in Social History of Medicine called Face/On “a significant and timely book,” noting that “Pearl writes beautifully and polemically, with a genuine passion for her subject.”[10] Pearl has served as the Geddes W. Simpson Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Maine,[11] and as the keynote speaker for the William A. Kern Conference in Visual Communication at Cal Tech,[12] and as a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University.