Letha Victor

Letha Victor (bachelor's, University of British Columbia; master's, McGill University; Ph.D., University of Toronto) is a sociocultural anthropologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies.

Her research projects since 2008 have centered on the Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda, where she has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork on postcolonial violence, haunting, human-spirit relations, and ethics. She is interested in a broad range of issues that include subjectivity, ethics, temporality, social change, religiosity, trauma and the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural legibility of suffering, witchcraft and conspiracy, and debates about morality, ritual expertise, and authenticity in Acholi society.

Currently, she is working on a book manuscript about ghostly vengeance and spiritual pollution in contemporary post-war Acholi. Dr. Victor’s current teaching focuses on ethnographic approaches to religion and healing cross-culturally, as well as religiosity and epistemology in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa.