Kelly E. Hayes
School of Liberal Arts / Department of Religious Studies
Expert Bio
Kelly E. Hayes is a professor of religious studies at Indiana University Indianapolis. An ethnographer who conducts long-term fieldwork projects, she is an expert on alternative and new religious movements, Brazilian religions, religion and healing, religions of the African diaspora, and religion, gender and sexuality.
Her latest book, “Spirits of the Space Age: The Imagined World of Brazil’s Valley of the Dawn” (Oxford 2024), was based on over a decade of fieldwork in Brasília with the spirit healing religion known as the Valley of the Dawn. As a historian of religion who works ethnographically, Hayes is interested in the processes through which certain kinds of beliefs, behaviors, bodies and desires become normative while others are rendered marginal or even unthinkable.
She studies forms of human cultural production that outsiders label as “cults” or “black magic” — that is, ways of engaging the supernatural that are deemed illegitimate — and the communities that form around them. Her body of work centers these communities and the lived experiences of their members. It argues not only for the significance of these groups, but that taking them seriously yields important theoretical insights for the field of religious studies and the humanities more broadly.
In 2023 she was named a permanent fellow in the Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences project on esoteric religions at Frederich Alexander University in Germany. In 2014, the prestigious Chautauqua Institute invited her as an expert speaker for its summer seminar on Brazil. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Brazil in fall 2012 and has twice received Fulbright-Hays grants for overseas study. She received the Thomas Robbins Award for Excellence in the Study of New Religions from the Association for the Academic Study of New Religions in 2013 and was honored with an IUPUI Research Frontiers Trailblazer Award in 2011.
Areas of Expertise
New religious movements, religion and ritual, gender and religion, Brazilian religions, religion and healing, esoteric art, religions of the African diaspora, religion and popular culture.