Interest in the cultural and ecological diversity of the world has led Anna to engage with the humanities, social sciences, ecology and biology, and to appreciate interdisciplinary approaches. In her research, she explores people’s relationship to the ecological environment and landscape, including pilgrimage, religion and ritual, botanical and medicinal knowledge, and their transformations in modernity’s economic and political developments. Through these themes, Anna also studies related cosmologies and histories. She mainly focuses on the Tibeto-Himalayan region, where she has spent several years. She pursued degrees in Asian Studies with strong elements of linguistics and Religious and Buddhist Studies (Charles University, Prague), Tibetan and Himalayan Studies (Oxford), and holds doctorates in Asian Studies (Charles University) and Anthropology (Oxford).

At the Institute, Anna will focus on preparing publications derived from her previous research and fieldwork, and also aims to start working on a new monograph. She is dealing with traditional social organisation in pastoralist and agricultural East Tibet and exploring how this organisation informs religion and cosmology. She also plans to examine present transformations of traditional elites and reconceptualisations of the notions of the land in the current global environmental crisis. She intends to present a new interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism by paying attention to these local structures, ideas, and related cosmologies, that are independent of Buddhism while substantially informing it.