Marianne Ulriksen's overall research focus is comparative welfare studies in the Global South. More specifically, she works on social justice and development, poverty and inequality, social protection, resource mobilization and taxation, and state-citizens relations in developing countries. She mainly conducts comparative and single-case studies in Southern and Eastern Africa.
In addition to the above topics, she also teaches and supervises on comparative politics, public policy, democratization, development studies, and Global South studies.
She is the project lead on SDU's JUST SOCIETY project, an interdisciplinary project that aims to promote equality by strengthening the rule of law, access to justice, and redistributive public policies through teaching, research and public engagement.