Erin Nourse

Erin Nourse, Ph.D., is a historian of religion at Regis University in Denver, Colorado, where she has taught since 2015. Erin teaches Religion and the Human Quest, the First-Year Writing Seminar, Faith and Justice in World Christianity, African Diaspora Religions, Interfaith Justice and Peacemaking, Ritual, and Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.

Originally from Corpus Christi, Texas, Erin earned her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2014. Her research interests include African religions, ritual, ethnographic approaches to the study of religion, Malagasy religions, pluralism and hybridity, and interfaith dialogue and collaboration. Erin enjoys both practicing and studying religion in its lived contexts. She has traveled and lived abroad in China, Uganda, and Madagascar. In Madagascar, she has conducted extensive research on birth rituals and rites of initiation for the newly born in the pluralistic port city of Diégo Suarez. She has published several articles and book chapters including “Women and the History of Religion in Africa” (Oxford Research Encyclopedia), “Hosting a First Haircutting in Diégo Suarez, Madagascar” (Ohio University Press), “Turning ‘Water Babies’ (Zaza Rano) into ‘Real Human Beings’ (Vrai Humains): Rituals of Blessing for the Newly Born in Diégo Suarez, Madagascar,” (Journal of Religion in Africa).

She is currently working on a book entitled Water into Bones: Birth Rituals, Ancestors, and Religious Hybridity in a Northern Malagasy Port Town which explores how Malagasy women adhere to ancestral practices in the hybridized environment of Diégo Suarez where children are often the products of unions between people of multiple faiths and ethnicities, or of the love between local women and the men temporary stationed as dockworkers on Diego’s shores, where one’s ancestors sometimes include both slaveholders and the enslaved, and where women, charged with the task of observing ancestral fady in their pregnancies, must listen to voices of ancestors whose lineages span the oceans. After the completion of this book, she hopes to pursue ethnographic research in the Denver area in addition to her continued research in Madagascar.  

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