Gala Rexer

I am a sociologist who studies how reproductive rights and health are shaped by militarization, environmental pollution, and enforced border regimes across transnational contexts.

Currently, I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick and an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (SPRC). Previously, I was a visiting research fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. I was also the SPRC’s inaugural postdoctoral fellow.

My first book, Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel (University of California Press, June 2026), shows how the Israeli state and its borders shape Palestinian women’s reproductive rights, health, and decision-making. You can hear me speak about it this fall semester at UCL, the University of Cambridge, NYU, and the University of Chicago (among others), as well as at bookstores and community spaces in Europe and the US (book tour flyer).

My second book-length project continues my broader research interest in how race, gender, and place shape reproductive health. Supported by my Leverhulme grant, Entangled Reproduction: Life in the Wastelands of Racial Capitalism brings together concerns for reproductive and environmental justice. It investigates how the uneven distribution of waste and toxicity materializes not only in polluting infrastructures and landscapes of debris, but also in people’s bodies and their everyday practices of social and biological reproduction.

My work has appeared in academic journals including Body and Society, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Text, Films for the Feminist Classroom, and The British Journal of Sociology. I am a guest editor for a Special Issue on Sociology in the Times of Genocide in The Sociological Review.

I was trained in Sociology (PhD) and Social Science (MA and BA) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I am based in London, UK.

upcoming book talks
School of International Service, American University, 9 November 2026

wooden shoe bookstore, philadelphia, 11 November 2026

brooklyn institute for social Research, jewish currents x lux magazine, 12 November 2026

Department for Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University, 12 November 2026

Pilsen Community books, Chicago, 16 November 2026

Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Chicago, 18 November 2026

Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Western University, 20 November 2026

department of Sociology, University of York, 03 March 2027