In October 2024, Lesley A. Sharp, Barbara Chamberlain & Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30 Professor of Anthropology, was awarded a $25,000 research grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to carry out her project “Deathcare in Carceral America: Reformed Masculinity and the Post-Carceral Lives of Former Prison Hospice Volunteers.”
A medical anthropologist by training, Sharp’s long-standing research concerns the social, moral, and medical underpinnings of death and dying, memorial projects, and the politics of care in contexts ranging from organ donation to bioengineering and prison healthcare.
This grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation will support Sharp’s latest research, which connects to her 2022 article “Death and Dying in Carceral America: The Prison Hospice as an Inverted Space of Exception,” (Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 36:2:177-197). Committed to playing a leadership role in anthropology, the foundation works to help anthropologists advance their studies, build sustainable careers, and amplify the impact of the field throughout the world.