Teaching Fellows

Kelsey Robbins is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist with research interests in religion, moral authority, and the politics of gender and reproduction. Her current book project explores how lay Catholics in the Republic of Ireland are transforming popular and deeply entrenched understandings of Catholic morality and ethical action by challenging the authority of the Catholic hierarchy and by reconfiguring relationships between the laity, the clergy, and the Irish state. Her work argues that fundamental to these efforts to renew and revitalize Catholicism are negotiations surrounding gender, sexuality, family formation, and social and biological reproduction. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the Society for Psychological Anthropology/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago. Kelsey holds a BA in Late Antique Cultures from Brown University and received her PhD in Comparative Human Development in 2021.