Luna Dolezal is currently a lecturer in Medical Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Exeter. Her research is primarily in the areas of applied phenomenology, philosophy of embodiment, philosophy of medicine and medical humanities (esp. through literature and philosophy). Luna’s recent monograph, The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body (Lexington Books, 2015), considers philosophical conceptions of embodied subjectivity through the work of the phenomenological thinkers Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, while engaging with feminist and medical scholarship on cosmetic surgery. This book explores how shame plays a key role in the social shaping of the body and the formation of subjectivity, using shame as a conceptual means to reconcile the phenomenological and social constructivist accounts of embodied subjectivity.

Luna’s current book project, The Politics of Shame (under contract with Bloomsbury Philosophy), explores the social and political dimensions of shame. Luna is also co-editor of Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters (co-edited with D. Petherbridge, SUNY Press, 2017) and the forthcoming New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (co-edited with C. Fischer, Palgrave Macmillan) Luna’s current research considers the cultural, social and affective determinants of health, with particular focus on conceptualizing loneliness, shame and belonging within health research contexts. She is the co-PI, with Dr Barry Lyons (Trinity College Dublin), on a Wellcome Trust-funded project called Shame and Medicine which is an engagement between medical practitioners, social scientists, philosophers and medical humanities scholars seeking to investigate the role of shame in the context of health, medicine and medical practice.

She is also a collaborator on Professor Stuart Murray’s Wellcome funded project “Augmenting the Body: Disability, Care and the Posthuman” which is based at the University of Leeds. Luna is on the Steering Committee of the Nordic Network for Gender, Body and Health and is collaborating on a 2-year project with the Network and funded by NOS-HS called “The Embodied Self, Health and Emerging Technologies: Implications for Gender and Identity.”