Unexpected Callings: Reimagining Ancestors and Queerness in Zimbabwe

Raffaella Taylor-Seymour is an anthropologist and historian of religion in Southern Africa. Her work examines religious transformations in the context of struggles over gender, sexuality, and the environment in Zimbabwe. In her research and writing, she interrogates how colonial states deployed ideas about religion to remake bodies, relations, and landscapes, and explores how people contest these legacies in the present. Her first book project is titled Ancestral Intimacies: Queerness, Relations, and Religion in Zimbabwe.

Raffaella holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and previously held postdoctoral positions at Columbia University and the University of Oxford. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the Lichtstern Prize for the Best Dissertation in Anthropology at the University of Chicago, the Association for Feminist Anthropology’s Dissertation Award, and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.