The intersection of religions and spiritualities with gender, focusing on women and embodiment, has always been a key topic in my research. This line of inquiry also is closely related to that on embodiment, health and religion. At the Université Laval, I have developped several courses on these topics (“Women and religions” and “Religions and sexualities”).

Many of my recent publications explore mothers, motherhood and mothering at the intersection with religions and spirituality, in a variety of culural contexts, in history and in contemporary settings, paying a particular attention to embodied aspects in relation to materiality and technology.

In 2021, in collaboration with three co-researchers and with funding of the collaborative international research grant of the American Academy of Religion, I led the project Beyond Mother Goddesses: New Directions for International Scholarship on Motherhood in Religious Studies. In 2017, I co-edited a volume on motherhood and polytheism. I am a regular contributor to several academic initiatives on these topics, for instance as part of the IAMAS conferences and other events on motherhood, mothering and maternal figures at the intersection with religion that I organized at the Université Laval. The latest of these is MATASUD, a symposium on motherhood and maternal figures in the religious traditions of South Asia.

Another topic of particular interest to me is the impact of the digitalization of fertility awareness practices and discourses and how these moved from religious settings into more secularized and yet spiritual circles, for instance around notions of “nature,” “sacred femininity,” and “self-knowledge,” which I explore critically.

In my postdoctoral research, I studied representations, practices, and discourses of “natural parenting” in the digital age, focusing on the religious, ritual and spiritual aspects of practices such as fertility management, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation and parenting. Entitled Natural Parenting in the Digital Age. At the Confluence of Mothering, Religion, Environmentalism and Technology, my project was funded through two mobility and one return grants of the Swiss National Science Foundation. The Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto was my main host institution during the completion of this research (2012-2016; with further collaborations), continued at the Université de Fribourg (2016-2017; Sciences des sociétés, des cultures et des religions).

Previously, in my PhD thesis, completed in 2012 at the Faculté des Lettres at the Université de Lausanne, I had used comparison as an explicit research design to study selected literary sources of ancient Greece and of early modern India,  that I accessed in their original languages. Representations of feminine figures in relationships with gods in several poetic, ritual, devotional and performative contexts were at the center of my exploration. My analysis focused on the adorned or naked body as a medium of religious expression, on the body put at the disposal of the god, in particular through ritual participation and “possession,” on the marking of the body, on violence in ritual or devotional contexts, and on the dissolution or disappearance of the female/feminine body.