Wendy Wolford is a scholar of development studies and political economy known for her research on land use, agrarian change, and global agriculture. She serves as vice provost for international affairs at Cornell University and is a professor in the Department of Global Development. Her work examines land reform, rural social movements, and the impacts of large scale agricultural investment in the Global South. She is the author of The Plantation Ideal: Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique, published by University of California Press in 2025, which analyzes plantation agriculture, land governance, and extraction in Mozambique.