POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH SCholar
Raffaella Taylor-Seymour 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.
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Visiting scholars
A.Y. 2022-2023
Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His writings cover a range of topics in social and cultural theory, the philosophical foundations of social thought and the human sciences, and the ethnography and history of Southeast Asia. In particular, he is interested in religion and ethics; semiotics and language; material culture; gifts, commodities, and money; and media. At present his research centers on two topics. The first concerns the ethical dimensions of political conflict, the second, the relations among ethical, religious, and economic systems of value. During his time at the Institute (spring, 2023), he will be working on a book on ethics and meeting with some the Institute’s past and current student fellows.
A.Y. 2021-2022
Neena Mahadev is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College. She has conducted fieldwork in Sri Lanka, and also in Singapore, with a focus on the theo-political interplay between Theravāda (Pāli) Buddhism, Pentecostal Christianity, and Roman Catholicism, and the innovations that arise within agonistic religious milieus. Her work appears in Current Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, Religion and Society, HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Religion, and Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. Currently, she serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Global Buddhism and is on the Series Board for New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity (Bloomsbury). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Max Planck Institute. Dr. Mahadev is finalizing her first book manuscript, Of Karma and Grace: Mediating Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka, for the series on Religion, Culture, and Public Life with Columbia University Press. The manuscript was awarded the 2021 Claremont Prize in Religion from IRCPL.
Lucinda Ramberg is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. Her research projects in South India have focused on the body as an artifact of culture and power in relation to questions of caste, sexuality, religiosity, and projects of social transformation. Her first book, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded several prizes. Her current book project, We Were Always Buddhist: Dalit Conversion and Sexual Modernity, investigates the sexual politics of lived Buddhism through an ethnography of religious conversion in contemporary South India. The research and writing of this book has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and the American Council for Learned Societies/Robert H. Ho Family Foundation for Buddhist Studies.
Angelantonio Grossi is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He is an anthropologist whose work reflects on questions of translation, coloniality, and religious conversion in the engagement between African spiritualists and digital infrastructures in an often-presumed Christian landscape. In his research, he interrogates common delineations of ethnic, linguistic, and geographical boundaries by foregrounding the role of Ghana-based spirit mediums in the mediatization and revaluation of traditions like Vodu across multi-continental geographies, including Afro-diasporic temporalities and experiences of blackness. At the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life he is completing his dissertation entitled Spirits in Circulation: Digital Media and Indigenous Spirituality in Post-Christian Ghana.