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Dr. Anna-Lena Wolf

• Curriculum Vitae
• Publications
• Presentations and events
• Teaching

Biography

Anna-Lena Wolf is a legal anthropologist with a focus at the intersection of law and religion. She has been working as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology (with Prof. Dr. Olaf Zenker) since 2019. Before she came to the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Anna-Lena Wolf worked as a doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Social Anthropology (with Prof. Dr. Julia Eckert) at the University of Bern. 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” (forthcoming with 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. In her current postdoctoral research project, Anna-Lena Wolf is investigating legal change and divine agency in Catholic canon law in central institutions of the Roman Curia. 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. Her regional focus is India and Italy.

Research Foci

• Legal anthropology, especially legal change, conceptualizations of justice, and juridification processes
• Political anthropology, especially social movements, and political economies
• Anthropology of religion, especially the anthropology of Christianity and Catholicism as well as methodological approaches to religion

Research Regions

• India
• Italy

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