Anna-Lena Wolf is a socio-cultural anthropologist with a focus at the intersection of law, politics, and religion. She is currently developing a new research project, in which she investigates the secularisation of personal laws in India in comparison to religiously grounded parts of affirmative action laws in India. The project analyses when and why people regard religion as a legitimate foundation of law. Between 2019 and 2025, Anna-Lena Wolf has been a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg) where she conducted her habilitation research on Catholic canon law in central institutions of the Holy Sea in Rome. Anna-Lena Wolf was a doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the University of Bern between 2014 and 2018. In her doctoral thesis, she analyzed changing notions of justice on tea plantations in the Northeast Indian state of Assam in the context of an Indian labor law reform. In her monograph “Labor on the Line” (Cornell University Press), Anna-Lena Wolf suggests different workings of justice in order to analyze the connection between justice imaginaries and people’s odds to act. From 2023 to 2024, Anna-Lena Wolf was a research resident at the Istituto Svizzero di Roma. As part of her doctorate, she spent one year as a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law & Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Anna-Lena Wolf completed her Master in social anthropology and South Asian History with honors at the University of Heidelberg in 2012.
Anna-Lena Wolf has been teaching at different universities for more than ten years. Among other things, she has taught general introductory courses on the history, theories and methods of anthropology as well as more thematically focused courses on the anthropology of justice, religious law, social movements, positionality, moral economies, human rights, universalism and cultural relativism.
