Hannah Appel

Hannah Appel is an Associate Professor and Associate Director at the Institute on Inequality + Democracy at UCLA. Her work bridges economic anthropology and critical studies of capitalism, focusing on finance, debt, and anti-capitalist movements.

• University of California, Los Angeles (Anthropology Department)
• Institute on Inequality + Democracy

Research interests include:

• Economic anthropology
• Transnational capitalism and finance
• Debt and debtors’ unions
• Africa in global capitalism
• Economic imagination
• Anti-capitalist and abolitionist social movements

Appel’s publications span ethnographic studies of oil extraction in Equatorial Guinea and experimental research on financial systems, including co-founding the Debt Collective to organize debtors’ unions. Her work theorizes capitalism through fieldwork-based lenses, emphasizing racialized and infrastructural dimensions.

Key projects include:

• The Licit Life of Capitalism (2019) – analyzing oil corporations in Equatorial Guinea
• Pan African Capital – studying African-owned financial institutions
• Debt Collective – organizing for $2B+ in debt abolition