Matt Canfield is Assistant Professor of Law & Society and Law & Development at the Van Vollenhoven Institute at Leiden Law School. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from New York University in 2017, and an MA from the Institute for Law & Society at NYU in 2012.
Matt’s scholarship examines the politics of food, agricultural, and environmental governance. Specifically, his research focuses on how social movements and civil society organizations mobilize for a democratic and ecologically sustainable global food system. His research has been published in Law & Society Review, Public Culture, Transnational Legal Theory, Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems and other scholarly journals. His book, Translating Food Sovereignty: Cultivating Justice in an Age of Transnational Governance will be published in Spring 2022 by Stanford University Press.
Before joining the Van Vollenhoven Institute, Matt was an Assistant Professor at Drake University and a Max Weber Fellow in the Department of Law at the European University Institute. He has also served as a visiting researcher in the Department of Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at Australia National University.
His research has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation, the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, and the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition.
Prior to teaching at Leiden Law School, Matt taught at Drake University, New York University, John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), and Hunter College (CUNY).
Matthew Canfield 