Raffaella Taylor-Seymour (PhD) is an anthropologist whose work examines religious life in the context of struggles over gender, sexuality, and the environment in Zimbabwe. Her research investigates how people navigate spiritual landscapes in the wake of colonization, the colonial suppression of religious practices involving ancestors, and the ongoing lives of ancestral spirits in the present. Her first book project, titled Ancestral Intimacies: Queer Spiritualities in Zimbabwe, explores how young queer people draw on the archives of African and Christian metaphysics to articulate novel forms of kinship, religiosity, and historical imagination. At IRCPL, Raffaella is pursuing a new research project that explores struggles over the meanings and effects of rainmaking rites against the backdrop of increasing water scarcity in Southern Africa. Raffaella holds a joint PhD in Anthropology and Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago, where her doctoral thesis was awarded the Lichtstern Prize for the Best Dissertation in Anthropology and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. She was previously a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford.
Raffaella’s full profile on the Department of Religion website can be viewed here.