AL (Annah) Zhu, PhD MPhil

Annah Lake Zhu is an Associate Professor studying globalization and the environment from an ethnographic perspective. She received her PhD in Society and Environment from the University of California, Berkeley, and her master’s in environmental management from Duke University. Her dissertation research analyzed the trade in endangered timber between Madagascar and China, with fieldwork conducted in both countries. Her current research focuses on the role of China in processes of environmental globalization and the impacts of "global China" on the environment.

Annah's research draws from time spent working for the United Nations Environment Program in Geneva, Switzerland, and the United States Peace Corps in Madagascar. She also has nearly a decade of experience managing environmental assessments for large government projects in the United States and has collaborated on research on environmental assessment in China with colleagues at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

On a theoretical level, Annah's research combines scholarship from geography, anthropology, and global governance to analyze global environmental transformation through the lens of the critical social sciences. She is author of the award-winning book Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China (Harvard University Press), as well as over 50 publications, including in leading journals such as Science, Nature Ecology & Evolution, Nature Food, and World Development, Global Environmental Change, American Ethnologist, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.