Staff profile

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. 

• 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

Authored book

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

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

• Quiroz-Uria, S. (in press). Is Pentecostalism an American religion?. American Religion,
• 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