Staff profile
Dr Sitna Quiroz Uria
Assistant Professor in the Study of Religion
Affiliation | Telephone |
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Assistant Professor in the Study of Religion in the Department of Theology and Religion | +44 (0) 191 33 43965 |
Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities |
Biography
I am a social anthropologist who specialises in the social Study of Religion. I studied Ethnohistory at the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) in Mexico. I then completed an MSc in Anthropology and Development and a PhD in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
My research to date has broadly focused on studying Christianity in postcolonial contexts. I have done long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Republic of Benin, where I focused on Pentecostalism, and in the Huasteca region of Mexico, where I studied an Indigenous (Nahua) Catholic prophetic and millenarian movement.
My current research interests involve the study of postcolonial religious entanglements in secularised contexts. I am interested in studying how non-Western spiritual traditions (mainly African and Indigenous American) have been reimagined and incorporated into the global mental health and well-being industry. In doing so, practitioners and clients are reconceptualising notions of personhood and the relationship between body and mind in therapeutic approaches that seek to address the inter-generational transmission of trauma.
I am interested in decolonial research methodologies and approaches to the Study of Religion. I am also keen on promoting the decolonisation of our curriculum in the Department of Theology and Religion. As a Mexican-born scholar, I am interested in establishing collaborative relationships with scholars who critically examine the historical and ongoing trans-Atlantic connections and entanglements between Europe, Africa, and Latin America and the long-term impacts of colonialism.
I convene and teach modules on the Study of Religion in Latin America and Africa, the Anthropology of Christianity, religion and gender, and ethnographic methods. I have also co-convened and taught a module on the Anthropology of Islam and have collaborated in teaching and supervising PhD students in the Department of Anthropology.
I welcome PhD applications for supervision on projects that involve the ethnographic study of contemporary religious phenomena with theoretical perspectives in the anthropology and sociology of religion.
Research interests
- Anthropology of Religion
- Decolonial perspectives in the Study of Religion
- Africa
- Latin America
- Fieldwork: Benin Republic; Mexico
- Christianity
- Pentecostalism
- Gender
- Kinship
- Post-colonial religious entanglements
- Secularism
Publications
Authored book
Chapter in book
- 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
- Quiroz, S. (2019). Benin. In Brill's Encyclopedia of Global Pentecostalism Online. Brill Academic Publishers
- 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 (170-183). Routledge
- Quiroz Uria, S. (2013). El movimiento de Amalia Bautista en la Huasteca Meridional. Milenarismo y cambio social a fines del siglo XX. In A. B. Pérez Castro (Ed.), La Huaxteca. Concierto de saberes en homenaje a Lorenzo Ochoa. IIA, COLSAN
Journal Article
Other (Print)