Gala Rexer

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Warwick

I am currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Sociology Department and an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (SPRC). In the fall 2025 term, 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. At Warwick, I serve as one of the co-directors of the Social Theory Centre. At UCL, I am a contributor to the SPRC podcast series.

Before joining Warwick, I was a Lecturer (Visiting Assistant Professor) in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at UCL’s SPRC (2023-2024), as well as the Centre’s inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-23). I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (awarded January 2022), funded by the German Heinrich Böll Foundation. My writing, teaching, and public engagement work draws from the fields of feminist theory, STS, anti-colonial thought, and medical and global sociology.

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

My first book, titled Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel (forthcoming August 2026, University of California Press), shows how Israeli policies profoundly impact Palestinian women’s reproductive rights, health, and decision-making, and foregrounds the sexual politics of settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel and beyond.

Supported by my Leverhulme grant, I have begun a second book project, Entangled Reproduction: Life in the Wastelands of Racial Capitalism, which 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.

Speaking (Upcoming)
“Gender, Sexuality, and Struggles against Settler Colonialism”
panel discussant, Global and Transnational Sociology Section, ASA Annual Meeting, New York City (august 2026)

“Slow, Spectacular, Catastrophic: The Reproductive Body and Temporalities of Violence in the 21st Century,” British Journal of Sociology Conference (April 2026)

“Waste as Relation: Studying Toxic Infrastructures and Health Inequalities,” BSA Conference (April 2026)

Research seminar “Social Justice, Cities and Citizenship,” University of Leeds (january 2026)

Past (selected)
Book talk “Demographic anxieties,” Center for the Study of Women and Society, CUNY (November 2025)

Visiting research Scholar presentation, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU (November 2025)

WGSS working group presentation, Yale University (october 2025)