Staff profile

I am a social anthropologist specialising in the social scientific study of religion, with a focus on postcolonial contexts and the enduring legacies of European colonialism. My current research explores how religion, spirituality, and therapeutic practices intersect in contemporary global cultures, particularly in relation to mental health and well-being. 

My academic training began with a degree in Ethnohistory from the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) in Mexico, followed by an MSc in Anthropology and Development and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. 

My earlier research explored Christianity as it is lived, transformed, and contested across different cultural landscapes. In Mexico's Huasteca region, I studied a Nahua Catholic prophetic movement led by a teenage woman called Amalia Bautista, whose visionary practices and millenarian narratives offered powerful responses to the colonial legacies of marginalisation affecting Indigenous communities in Mexico. Seeking broader horizons, I came to the UK and conducted research in West Africa on Pentecostal Christianity, a global expression of faith with deep entanglements in postcolonial realities. In the Republic of Benin, I carried out ethnographic fieldwork with Pentecostal communities, examining how conversion and the imperative to be "born again" shaped marriage relations, gender roles, family expectations, and negotiations with extended kin networks. 

Looking back, I see that my interest in anthropology emerged from a deeply personal place. As a mestiza woman born in Mexico, I was drawn to the discipline in search of ways to understand the painful legacy of colonialism that had severed my connection to my Indigenous ancestry. Studying anthropology in Mexico, I became increasingly aware of how the discipline itself often reproduced internal colonial logics, shaped by the very histories it sought to study. These questions became more urgent, not only intellectually, but also deeply personally, as I navigated my own story within the strucures of academia in the UK. My efforts to make sense of these colonial wounds eventually led me to train as a Systemic Constellations practitioner, a therapeutic modality focused on intergenerational trauma and ancestral repair. 

Now, my academic and practitioner work converge around a shared commitment: to study the ongoing impact of colonialism in ways that are intellectually rigorous, emotionally honest, and relationally accountable. At the centre of this work is an exploration of religion, spirituality, and faith, not as static, but as living practices throught which people navigate historical and systemic ruptures, seek "healing", and imagine new ways of being in the world. 

My current research focuses on what I call colonial religious entanglements within "secular" therapeutic cultures of the global North. I am particularly interested in how non-Western and Indigenous spiritual traditions are being recontextualised within the global mental health and well-being industry. Rather than centering solely on critiques of cultural appropriation, I examine these processes as expressions of deeper systemic and affective dynamics, rooted in an urgent desire to respond to our current planetary crises yet often entangled with the same extractive logics they seek to transcend. This inquiry also attends to how therapeutic interventions reshape understandings of the body-mind relationship and of personhood. As a practitioner of Systemic Constellations, I aim to foster collaborations between scholars and practitioners to develop critical, relational methodologies for the study of religion, health and well-being. I also seek to cultivate collaborations with others working on the trans-Atlantic entanglements between Europe, Africa and Latin America, with attention to the long-term consequences of colonialism and the co-creation of generative responses to its ongoing harms. 

From 2025 to 2027, I will co-lead the "Spirituality, Health and Wellbeing" research theme at the Institute of Medical Humanities. This initiative explores what it means to be well amidst deepening ecological, economic and social crises, and asks what role spirituality might play in shaping more grounded, existential and relational imaginaries of health and care. 

In my teaching, I aim to create spaces of inquiry that are rigurous yet relational, where students are invited not only to think critically, but to feel and reflect on their own situatedness in the worlds we study. I convene and teach modules on religion in Latin America and Africa, the anthropology of Christianity, gender and religion, and ethnographic research methods. I am also committed to fostering the decolonisation of the curriculum within the Department of Theology and Religion and work closely with colleagues and doctoral students across disciplines, including the Department of Anthropology.  

I welcome PhD applications for supervision on projects that involve the ethnographic study of contemporary religious phenomena, with theoretical perspectives rooted in the anthropology and sociology of religion. 

• Anthropology of Religion
• Colonial religious entanglements
• Secularism
• 'Spirituality', health and Wellbeing
• Decolonial methodologies and theories
• Africa
• Latin America
• Fieldwork: Benin Republic; Mexico
• Christianity
• Pentecostalism
• Gender
• Kinship

Authored book

• Evangelizacion o fanatismo en la Huasteca?. El caso de Amalia Bautista Hernandez
  
  Quiroz Uria, S. (2008). Evangelizacion o fanatismo en la Huasteca?. El caso de Amalia Bautista Hernandez. CIESAS, COLSAN.

Chapter in book

• From the Gods' Mountains to the Messiah's Glade: Christian Landscapes of Africa and Asia
  
  Miles-Watson, J., & Quiroz, S. (2022). From the Gods’ Mountains to the Messiah’s Glade: Christian Landscapes of Africa and Asia. In J. Bielo & A. Ron (Eds.), Landscapes of Christianity: Destination, Temporality, Transformation.. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Benin
  
  Quiroz, S. (2019). Benin. In Brill’s Encyclopedia of Global Pentecostalism Online. Brill Academic Publishers.
• Seeking God's Blessings: Pentecostal Religious Discourses, Pyramidal Schemes and Money Scams in the Southeast of Benin Republic
  
  Quiroz, S. (2016). Seeking God’s Blessings: Pentecostal Religious Discourses, Pyramidal Schemes and Money Scams in the Southeast of Benin Republic. In D. Whyte & J. Wiegratz (Eds.), Neoliberalism and the moral economy of fraud. (pp. 170-183). Routledge.
• El movimiento de Amalia Bautista en la Huasteca Meridional. Milenarismo y cambio social a fines del siglo XX
  
  Quiroz Uria, S. (2013). El movimiento de Amalia Bautista en la Huasteca Meridional. Milenarismo y cambio social a fines del siglo XX. In La Huaxteca. Concierto de saberes en homenaje a Lorenzo Ochoa. IIA, COLSAN.

Journal Article

• The Dilemmas of Monogamy: Pleasure, Discipline and the Pentecostal Moral Self in the Republic of Benin
  
  Quiroz, S. (2016). The Dilemmas of Monogamy: Pleasure, Discipline and the Pentecostal Moral Self in the Republic of Benin. Religions, 7(8), Article 102. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7080102

Other (Print)

• Is Pentecostalism an American religion?
  
  Quiroz-Uria, S. (2023). Is Pentecostalism an American religion? [American Religion: Journal Supplements]. Indiana University Press.