Research Interests
Raffaella’s research investigates how people navigate religious landscapes in the wake of colonization, the colonial suppression of ancestral practices, and the worlds brought into being by ancestors and spirits in the present. Her first book project, titled Ancestral Intimacies: Queerness, Relations and Religion in Zimbabwe, is an ethnography of the spiritual lives of queer Zimbabweans. The book explores how young queer people draw on the archives of African and Christian thought to reimagine historical pasts and articulate novel forms of kinship and religiosity.
Raffaella's new research explores everyday struggles over the meanings and effects of rainmaking rites against the backdrop of increasing water scarcity in Southern Africa. This project examines how Southern Africa epistemologies shape responses to environmental catastrophe in the region and how climate change is igniting new metaphysical debates. She has been conducting research in Zimbabwe since 2012 and is deeply committed to building collaborative partnerships with scholars and researchers in Zimbabwe, and welcomes being contacted by anyone who would like to get in touch.
Raffaella holds a joint PhD in Anthropology and Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago, where her doctoral dissertation was awarded the Lichtstern Prize for the Best Dissertation in Anthropology, the Association for Feminist Anthropology’s Dissertation Award, and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. She holds an MA in Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago and a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology from King’s College, University of Cambridge. Before coming to Duke, she was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University (2023-25) and a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford (2022-23).