THE TEAM

Marc is principal investigator of IMPACT HAU and full professor of anthropology in the Department of Cultural Heritage, at the University of Bologna. He obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge, and has carried out fieldwork in Suriname and French Guiana (among the Trio, Wayana and Akuriyo), and in southern Italy. IMPACT HAU is part of Marc's ongoing research in the anthropology of sustainability.

Claudia holds a MA in foreign languages and cultural mediation and an MA in Social Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). Her research focuses on impact and social investment narratives and the socio-technical formations they produce when instantiated in development projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. For her PhD, she is looking at the case of a social enterprise that makes use of impact capital to reduce poverty through sustainable agriculture in rural Ghana.

Ben Eyre is a research fellow at the University of Bologna whose work focusses on social finance, sustainability, and market-based approaches to development through ethnography that spans from boardrooms in North America and Europe to rural life in East Africa. His research engages with the agency of (potential) beneficiaries and the contribution of user insights to impact investing policy and practice.

His current research explores green finance and impact investing in Kenya through case studies including the IFC 'Forests Bond' and investments in sustainable agriculture and financial inclusion. Previous research has explored 'philanthrocapitalist' initiatives to transform cattle-keeping and promote a value chain approach to the dairy industry among Nyakyusa agro-pastoralists in Rungwe District in South-West Tanzania, and high-net-worth philanthropy in the City of London. He has worked for over a decade as an advisor to philanthropists and impact investors.

Riccardo De Cristano is an economic anthropologist and a PhD student at the University of Bologna. His research focuses on the blockchain and the green finance. In particular, he is investigating the role of technology and how it ends up embodying and reproducing the values of the society from which it stems. He’s currently a visiting  student at Lund Universitet. 

Alessandro is a mechanical engineer and studied anthropology at Ca'Foscari university in Venice. He is researching financial communities and technologies for impact investing.

Chris hosts the monthly Hau of Finance  Online Seminar Series (see the events page for details!) and his research analyzes the securitization of social housing in Dakar (Senegal).

Natalia Gómez Muñoz is a social anthropologist and a doctoral student at the University of Bologna. Her research for the ERC funded project “Impact Hau” focuses on the lived experiences of forced migrants that have participated in programs of employability, funded through Social Impact Investing initiatives in Colombia. Previously, she has worked and researched in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Germany, on issues like racism, linguistic ideologies, education, exile, memory making, and peacebuilding. The theme connecting her different projects is the exploration of how people and institutions deal with migration, and forced migration. 

Natalia is the the co-founder of the Network for Interdisciplinary Research on the Americas (RIIA), in Nürnberg, Germany. She also volunteers for the Colombian Truth Commission, working among Colombian exiles and asylum seekers in Germany. 

Jenna Randolph is a doctoral student at the University of Bologna. Her research for Impact Hau focuses on social impact bonds and global health. As a master's student at King's College London her dissertation research focused on the emergence of birth territory theory in understanding the experience of giving birth in the home versus the hospital setting in Nakuru and Baringo counties of Kenya. Jenna has conducted fieldwork in Africa, Latin America, and Western Europe. Her most recent fieldwork was conducted in the Kolda region of Senegal, where she primarily focused on maternal, infant, and newborn health, infectious disease, and agricultural development. Jenna's primary research interests include medical anthropology, human and animal health, multispecies biopolitics, zoonotic diseases, and One Health.

Stefan Voicu received his PhD in sociology and social anthropology at Central European University, researching the transformations of arable land property relations and agri-food commodity chains in postsocialist Romania in connection to the financialization of global capitalism. His research interests are agrarian class formation, uneven development, environmental change, and visual methods. As research fellow at IMPACT HAU project, he will conduct a social survey focused on how impact finance is understood by investors and the final beneficiaries of these investments.

Aneil's research for Impact Hau focused on the study of blue bonds and the blue economy. As a PhD student at Brandeis University, his dissertation research focused on the development of climate finance and the dynamics of the green bond market. Aneil has been a visiting researcher at Cass Business School and Lancaster University, as well as an associate of the Center of the Anthropology of Sustainability at University College London. He has worked in climate finance for five years in a range of roles at the Climate Bonds Initiative. His research has been published in the Journal of Environmental Investing and Economic Anthropology.

Zikri has studied business, economics and finance at Penn State and Oxford. As a researcher at IMÄCT HAU, he analyzed the emergence of green standards for Islamic bonds (sukuks), in Malaysia.

After obtaining her PhD from the University of Western Sydney, Giulia worked as a researcher at the University of Sydney and at Trinity College, Dublin. Her research adopts a multidisciplinary lens to explore the processes of financialisation and the changes brought about by the entry of financial capital into post-socialist contexts, China and Eastern Europe. As a researcher at IMPACT HAU, she was in charge of a case study analyzing the issuance of a Chinese Green Bond in Europe.

As a researcher at IMPACT HAU, Roberta analyzed the configuration of EU ‘recovery bonds’ between a regime of emergency and one of sustainability. She works at the intersection of medical anthropology, environmental anthropology and science and technology studies, with a focus on microbes and viruses. After her PhD at the University of Lausanne, she obtained a Marie Curie fellowship (Trento and Monash University) and a Fulbright Robert Schuman Award (UCLA, Institute of Society and Genetics).

Chelsie Yount-André is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist at the University of Bologna. Her research for the Impact Hau project focused on the African Development Bank's "Fight Covid-19" social impact bonds, and analyzed how funds are disbursed and circulate on the ground in Dakar. After obtaining her PhD from Northwestern University & the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), she worked as a researcher at the University of Montpellier, France (CIRAD). Her work examines how global political economic transformations become relevant in people’s everyday lives, analyzing the moral language that mediates economic practices and using food as a point of entry to investigate how monetary and moral value is produced across scales. Her dissertation research examined how transnational Senegalese families negotiate “economic moralities,” that is, normative expectations regarding resource redistribution. Her subsequent projects have scaled up this research, investigating economic moralities in multinational corporations and in the financial sector in Africa.

Oiara Bonilla obtained her PhD at the Ecoles des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), and teaches anthropology at the Federal University Fluminense (UFF, Brazil). Her fieldwork is concentrated in the Brazilian Amazon, where she has been conducting her research since 1996. As a researcher at IMPACT HAU, she analyzed the development impact bond (DIB) for the sustainable production of Asháninka cocoa in the Peruvian Amazon.