Skip to main content
Overview

Dr Sitna Quiroz Uria

Assistant Professor in the Study of Religion


Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
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

Supervision students