Biography
I am currently a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. I received my PhD and MA in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, where I also worked as a lecturer.
An anthropologist of religion, my work concerns the way that people construct ethical lives in settings of uncertainty and how religion and professed theology shape the possibilities and constraints of these moral efforts.
My current book manuscript draws from extended ethnographic fieldwork with middle-class Christians in Harare, Zimbabwe. I examine the questions of human freedom and moral responsibility that arise in regular ethical and theological debates among urban Zimbabwean Baptists living in a tumultuous economic climate. These debates play out not only in their institutional religious lives, but also with regards to kinship, participation in life-cycle rituals, gender ideologies, and political engagement.
A newer project that I am developing investigates class and religion, engaging middle-class experiences in sub-Saharan Africa.
Research
Anthropology of Religion, Christianity, the anthropological study of ethics and morality, urban Africa, Baptist and neo-Calvinist theology, middle-classes, time and temporality, anthropological theory, linguistic anthropology, social change.
Publications
2019. Williams Green, Leanne. “Sin and Sovereignty in the Lives of Urban Baptists in Zimbabwe.” Ethnos. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1640263
2017. Joel Robbins and Leanne Williams Green. “In What Does Failure Succeed? Conceptions of Sin and the Role of Human Moral Vulnerability in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity,” In Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion, edited by Daan Beekers and David Kloos, 21-36. New York: Berghahn.
2019. Review of A Diagram for Fire: Miracles and variation in an American charismatic movement. By Jon Bialecki. Reading Religion: A Publication of the American Academy of Religion.
2018. Review of On Knowing Humanity: Insights from theology for anthropology. London and New York: Routledge. Edited by Eloise Meneses and David Bronkema. Anthrocybib/New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity.
