Raffaella Taylor-Seymour Unpacks Complex Religious Identities

When Raffaella Taylor-Seymour first visited Zimbabwe in 2012 as an undergraduate, she didn’t know it was the start of a lifelong commitment. 

Taylor-Seymour, assistant professor of Religious Studies, has returned to Zimbabwe almost every year since. “It felt like the natural place for my work,” she said. “Over the last 13 years, it really has become a commitment. I view my research as a conversation and collaboration with my partners in Zimbabwe, and the work I do is as much for them and with them as it is for academic readership.” 

Taylor-Seymour is interested in how ancestral, pre-colonial religious practices were challenged by the actions of Christian missionaries and the British colonial government, and how people navigate Zimbabwe’s religious landscape today. 

Her first book project, “Ancestral Intimacies: Queerness, Relationality and Religion in Zimbabwe,” explores questions around gender and sexuality from the first few decades of colonial rule to the present. Her more recent work looks at intersections between religion, the environment and climate change. 

The population of Zimbabwe is heavily Christian, but Taylor-Seymour cautioned that official census data can obscure a lot of complexity. Many people hold plural religious affiliations. “Maybe their mother is Catholic and their father's family is Protestant,” she said. “Some weeks you might go to one church, some weeks to another church. At the same time, one of your grandparents may practice an ancestral form of religion and occasionally you'll participate in that, too.” 

Taylor-Seymour looks outside of formal, bounded religious identity markers to see how religion plays out in people’s everyday lives. “The established way of studying religion is to think about church as the place where religion happens,” she said. “I'm interested in religion that exceeds Sunday morning. I want to know how people are dipping in and out of different spaces and creating a complex, layered religious identity for themselves.” 

Just as Taylor-Seymour has forged collaborations with colleagues in Zimbabwe, she has already started reaching out to her colleagues at Duke. Her class, Religion and the Anthropocene, is part of the First-Year Constellation How Does Climate Change Affect Our World?. Participating in a Constellation places her in an intellectual community of colleagues and students who are examining climate change in an interdisciplinary context. 

The idea for the class came out of Taylor-Seymour’s research on the often-unexpected role religion has played in understandings of the relationship we have with the world around us, which includes our obligations to other species as well as to other people.  

Taylor-Seymour will teach a class this spring called Sex, Bodies and Religion, which examines how religion informs the ways people experience gender and sexuality, as well as how gender and sexuality shape people's religious experiences. 

In addition to Taylor-Seymour, Religious Studies is welcoming two additional faculty, Daniel Herskowitz, Smart Family Associate Professor in Judaic Studies, and Neena Mahadev, whose research focuses on Southeast Asia. The hiring of three faculty whose work engages the global diversity of religions across time and place, and from a variety of perspectives, underscores Religious Studies’ commitment to enhancing the understanding of religion as a primary human endeavor that is inherently interdisciplinary. 

“We are thrilled to welcome three gifted scholars who bring such a wide range of expertise, experiences and questions to the study of religion, globally and locally,” said Jennifer Knust, chair of Religious Studies. “Daniel, Neena and Raffaella are already contributing significantly to our teaching and research mission. Their energy and enthusiasm are infectious!”