DrLeanne Williams Green

Leanne joined the Discipline of Anthropology as a Lecturer in 2025. As an anthropologist focused on religion and inequality, she examines how people try to live ethical lives in conditions where it would seem difficult to do so. She is committed to the possibility that anthropological writing and research can be transformative in teaching and in engagement with the world. She received her PhD at the University of California, San Diego, and was subsequently a Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Please access Leanne's full list of publications here.

Leanne's work concerns the way that people construct ethical lives in settings of uncertainty and how religion and professed theology shape the possibilities and constraints of these moral efforts. Her previous work draws from extended ethnographic fieldwork with middle-class Christians in Harare, Zimbabwe. She has examined questions of human freedom and moral responsibility that arose in regular ethical and theological debates among urban Zimbabwean Baptists living in a tumultuous economic climate. These debates play out not only in their institutional religious lives, but also with regards to kinship, participation in life-cycle rituals, gender ideologies, and political engagement.

As a Horizon educator, Leanne is also engaged in scholarship of learning and teaching. She is researching and supporting place-based learning initiatives in the School of Social and Political Sciences. 

Before joining the University of Sydney, Leanne taught and researched at the University of Cambridge, UK and the University of California, San Diego, USA.