KURZBIOGRAPHIE

Judith Bovensiepen is the Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Before taking on this position, she worked as a Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris (2010-2011). 

Bovensiepen’s current research focuses on human-environment relations, natural resource extraction, and the transformation of animist orientations through interactions with changing political, economic and religious regimes. This is part of a broader interest in how we can draw on anthropological approaches to knowledge and ignorance in order to study the relations between energy and society. Most of Bovensiepen’s research focusses on Southeast Asia, specifically Timor-Leste, where she has been carrying out ethnographic research since 2005. Her previous work focussed on analysing the dynamics of post-conflict recovery, examining how people’s relations with the environment are transformed by violence and forced displacement. For her research achievements, Bovensiepen won the Nadel Essay Prize in 2014 and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2020. 

Judith Bovensiepen is the author of the monograph The Land of Gold: Post-conflict Recovery and Cultural Revival in independent Timor-Leste (2015, Cornell University Press), the editor of The Promise of Prosperity (2018, ANU Press) and the author of numerous book chapters and articles, published in journals such as American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Ethnos, Oceania and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.  She co-edited two special issues, one on ‘Megaprojects and National Development Models in Timor-Leste’ (TAPJA) and one on Wilful Blindness in Critique of Anthropology. She is currently working on a monograph with the provisional title: Oil Fever: Animism and Extractivism in Post-Revolutionary Timor-Leste.

FORSCHUNGSSCHWERPUNKTE

• the intersections of politics and cosmology
• animism and religious transformations
• human-environment relations and wellbeing
• post-conflict recovery
• colonial and post-colonial history
• natural resource extraction, energy and society
• kinship, politics and gender
• knowledge, ignorance and wilful blindness
• artificial intelligence and sustainability
• emerging technologies and just transition

PROJEKTE (PROJEKTLEITER)

• 2015-2019: ESRC: Future Research Leaders Grant, Anticipating Prosperity: A Study of Community Expectations and the Petroleum Industry in Timor-Leste
• 2024-2029: ERC Consolidator Grant: An Interactionist Approach towards Animism and Extractivism in Southeast Asia