An Illustrated Lecture with Dr. Sharrona Pearl, Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania

Date: Tuesday, February 3rd
Time: 8pm
Admission: $8 ( Tickets Here )
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, Brooklyn, 11215

Can we see ourselves better through the lens of others? Victorian asylum doctor Hugh Welch Diamond thought so. An important innovator of early photographic techniques, Diamond used pictures with his patients for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, staging his pictures to maximize their efficacy for both. Though photographic physiognomy, Diamond tried to change the nature of asylum practice, using images of his patients to nurture them to health without physical restraints. Tonight’s talk will examine his pictures, and at the same time, examine our own reactions to them, gauging not just what pictures of patients tell us about the past, but what they tell us about ourselves.

Sharrona Pearl is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an expert on physiognomy, the study of facial features and their relationship to character traits. Her training is in the History of Science and Medicine, and her interdisciplinary work spans from visual culture to communication to gender studies. Dr Pearl’s first book - “About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain” - was published by Harvard University Press in 2010. She is currently working on a new book entitled “Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other”