Having studied Social Work, Humanitarian Aid and African Studies with a strong anthropological and historical focus in Berlin, New Orleans and Dar es Salaam before, Anna Orinsky completed her PhD at the European University Institute in Florence in 2025. Before completion, she also held a position as a guest researcher at the Central European University in Vienna. Recently, Orinsky has taught at the Institute of Asian and African Studies of Humboldt University. Towards the end of 2026, Anna Orinsky will leave Berlin for Accra as a Junior Fellow with the Merian Institute of Advanced Studies in Africa. She is currently revising her doctoral thesis for future book publication.

Her doctoral thesis Reproductive Choice in Kaiserwilhelmsland and German-East Africa. A Comparative Study on the Translation of Natalism to the Colonies and (Female) Means of Avoiding Offspring, 1875 – 1929. focused on contraception, abortion and infanticide as forms of birth control in two former German colonies (in East Africa and modern-day Papua New Guinea). Orinsky further investigates the exchange of ideas regarding birth control and ensuing moral panics between the German metropole and its claimed colonial peripheries. Diverse versions of banning abortion and infanticide were introduced into the so-called ‘native law’ of the German colonies at the discretion of individual colonial governors. To understand these complex dynamics of transmission, Anna Orinsky's research examines concepts of empire, religious and economic motives, views on womanhood, and ideas about the beginning of (colonised) life. Religious ideals and moral understandings, eugenics, Christian authority, emerging science and science ethics, tradition and the belief that foetuses possess souls all supported bans and restrictions controlling female reproduction. Throughout her doctoral research, Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany’s reproductive realities are read in connection with the former empire’s colonial possessions.

Her new Project Studies on Possession, Insanity, Religion, and Institutions in Twentieth Century West Africa. (acronym: SPIRIT) examines the gendered dimensions of mental illness, spirit possession and confinement in twentieth-century West Africa, focusing on Ghana and Liberia between 1914 and 1980. The project investigates how patriarchal power, social vulnerability, and beliefs in the supernatural contributed to forms of enforced or semi-voluntary isolation, particularly among women accused of witchcraft or spirit possession. Through archival research and oral histories, this second project reconstructs the historical emergence and transformation of so-called “witch camps” and “prayer camps” as informal mental-health institutions. The project situates these practices within broader histories of psychiatry, including gendered diagnoses such as hysteria and tropical lunacy, and develops a comparative framework that contrasts British colonial, German colonial, and Americo-Liberian approaches to mental illness. By foregrounding gender, belief systems, and institutional power, SPIRIT offers a historically grounded intervention into contemporary debates on stigma, confinement, and mental health.

“The Beautiful Abortifacient.” In: Körperliche und pflanzliche Poetik. Florale Literatur zwischen Mensch und Blume. Ed.: Sophie E. Seidler, Hannes Mittermaier, Qingyu Cai et al. Bielefeld: Transcript 2025.

“The New Woman in Colonial Imagination” In: [kon] Paper (Journal edition titled: Hybrid) 2025.

Friedrich Niclas Ammermann, Paul Barrett, Lucile Boucher, et. al. “For a Fair(er) Global History” In: Cromohs. 03. Februar 2021.