Sharrona Pearl is Associate Professor of Bioethics and History in the Health Care Administration Department at Drexel University, USA. She is the author of Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Super Recognition (2023), Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (2017), and About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2010). Her writing has appeared in Public Books, Lilith Magazine, The Revealer, and The Washington Post, among others.

Masking is, as Sharrona Pearl wisely observes, a complicated enterprise: masks can protect and buffer even as they diminish, eviscerate, and lie. With a historian's rigor and a human's candor, Pearl addresses all of this and more. From public health to performance and ritual, Mask interrogates the personal, public, and inevitably paradoxical ways we both conceal and reveal our increasingly imperiled selves.

• Introduction1. My Mask Rules, Often Broken2. Physiognomy3. Feature/Bug: Multivalence4. History: Not of Socks5. Performing as Protection6. Freedom and Constraint: Whose Trust Matters7. Medical Masks and the Covid Elephant8. Violence and the Masks of War9. No Way to Hide10. Villain/Hero: V'Nahafoch Hu11. Superheroes, or: Who Watches the Watchers12. The Eyes Have It: Face Facemasks and Looking Like Ourselves13. ExposureAcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex

Sharrona Pearl is Associate Professor of Bioethics and History in the Health Care Administration Department at Drexel University, USA. She is the author of Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Super Recognition (2023), Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (2017), and About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2010). Her writing has appeared in Public Books, Lilith Magazine, The Revealer, and The Washington Post, among others.

Masking is, as Sharrona Pearl wisely observes, a complicated enterprise: masks can protect and buffer even as they diminish, eviscerate, and lie. With a historian's rigor and a human's candor, Pearl addresses all of this and more. From public health to performance and ritual, Mask interrogates the personal, public, and inevitably paradoxical ways we both conceal and reveal our increasingly imperiled selves.

• Introduction1. My Mask Rules, Often Broken2. Physiognomy3. Feature/Bug: Multivalence4. History: Not of Socks5. Performing as Protection6. Freedom and Constraint: Whose Trust Matters7. Medical Masks and the Covid Elephant8. Violence and the Masks of War9. No Way to Hide10. Villain/Hero: V'Nahafoch Hu11. Superheroes, or: Who Watches the Watchers12. The Eyes Have It: Face Facemasks and Looking Like Ourselves13. ExposureAcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex

Sharrona Pearl is Associate Professor of Bioethics and History in the Health Care Administration Department at Drexel University, USA. She is the author of Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Super Recognition (2023), Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (2017), and About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2010). Her writing has appeared in Public Books, Lilith Magazine, The Revealer, and The Washington Post, among others.

Masking is, as Sharrona Pearl wisely observes, a complicated enterprise: masks can protect and buffer even as they diminish, eviscerate, and lie. With a historian's rigor and a human's candor, Pearl addresses all of this and more. From public health to performance and ritual, Mask interrogates the personal, public, and inevitably paradoxical ways we both conceal and reveal our increasingly imperiled selves.

• Introduction1. My Mask Rules, Often Broken2. Physiognomy3. Feature/Bug: Multivalence4. History: Not of Socks5. Performing as Protection6. Freedom and Constraint: Whose Trust Matters7. Medical Masks and the Covid Elephant8. Violence and the Masks of War9. No Way to Hide10. Villain/Hero: V'Nahafoch Hu11. Superheroes, or: Who Watches the Watchers12. The Eyes Have It: Face Facemasks and Looking Like Ourselves13. ExposureAcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex