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. She is the author of the monograph The Land of Gold: Post-conflict Recovery and Cultural Revival in independent Timor-Leste (2015, Cornell UP), the editor of The Promise of Prosperity (2018, ANU Press) and the author of numerous book chapters and journal articles. For her research achievements, Bovensiepen won the Nadel Essay Prize in 2014 and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2020.

Judith Bovensiepen’s research has been funded by an ESRC Future Research Leaders Grant (2015-2019) and in 2023 she was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant.