Anna-Lena Wolf is a social and cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of law, politics, and religion. Her work examines everyday conceptions of justice, processes of legal transformation, activism and affirmative action, questions of decolonizing global legal orders, as well as (more-than-)human agency.
She is currently a lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, a research affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and a member of the DFG research network Law in the Anthropocene. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Social Anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, where she conducted her ethnographic habilitation project on legal transformations in Catholic canon law within key institutions of the Holy See in Rome – the world’s oldest global bureaucracy.
Anna-Lena Wolf received her PhD from the University of Bern. Her doctoral research analyzed how everyday notions of justice are negotiated and transformed on tea plantations in the northeastern Indian state of Assam in the context of a comprehensive Indian labor law reform. Based on this ethnographic research in Assam, her monograph, Labor on the Line (Cornell University Press, 2025) develops an analytical framework for the multiple workings of justice to examine the relationship between imaginaries of justice and forms of agency. Additional findings have been published in journals including Anthropology and Humanism, Anthropology of Work Review, and Public Anthropologist.
Her research appointments include a research residency at the Istituto Svizzero di Roma and a visiting scholar appointment at the Center for the Study of Law & Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. She received her MA in Anthropology and South Asian History, with distinction, from Heidelberg University.
Anna-Lena Wolf has more than ten years of teaching experience in social and cultural anthropology. Her teaching includes introductory courses in anthropological theory, history, and methods, as well as seminars on justice, affirmative action, human rights, social movements, religious law, positionality, moral economies, and debates surrounding universalism and cultural relativism.
