Sonja van Wichelen

Sonja van Wichelen is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her research takes place on the cross-disciplinary node of law, life, and science in a globalizing world. At the moment she is working on the postcolonial politics of bioscience governance in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Indonesia. A graduate of Utrecht University (BA, MA) and the University of Amsterdam (PhD), she held postdoctoral positions in the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University (2007-2009), the Pembroke Center at Brown University (2009-2010), and the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney (2010-2014) before joining the University of Sydney in 2015. She also held a visiting appointment with the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California-Berkeley (Fall 2017) and was a Member with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2020-2021). In the 2025 Michaelmas term, she will be a visiting fellow with the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. Sonja is convenor of the Biopolitics of Science Research Network, research leader of the BioHumanity Theme, and member of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, the Charles Perkins Centre, and the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies. She is Committee Member of the Annual Review of Anthropology, co-editor of the Biolegalities Book Series, and on the editorial boards of Science, Technology & Human Values, The Sociological Review, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.