Judith Bovensiepen

Prof. Judith Bovensiepen is Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OEAW) and Honorary Professor at the University of Vienna's Institute for Cultural and Social Anthropology. She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and has conducted postdoctoral research at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris (2010-2011). Her research focuses on animism, human-environment relations, and natural resource extraction in Southeast Asia, particularly Timor-Leste. She has led major projects such as the ERC Co-G grant on animism and extractivism (2025-2030) and an ESRC grant on petroleum industry impacts (2015-2019). She has published extensively including monographs like The Land of Gold (2015) and edited volumes on Timor-Leste's development politics.

Her work explores how political, economic, and religious regimes reshape animist orientations, emphasizing knowledge-production dynamics in energy-society relations. Recent research examines oil infrastructure development's sociocultural impacts, blending ethnographic methods with critical theory. Awards include the Nadel Essay Prize (2014) and Philip Leverhulme Prize (2020).

Prof. Bovensiepen's work connects post-conflict recovery, environmental governance, and colonial legacies. She co-edits special issues on topics like 'Wilful Blindness' in Critique of Anthropology and 'Megaprojects in Timor-Leste' in TAPJA. Current projects investigate extractivism's ontological dimensions and future energy transitions.