Her current research examines the relationship between religion and politics in Southeast Asia, particularly in Singapore. Broadly, she focuses on processes of religious transformation: why are some ritual practices discarded, seemingly without regret, while others become orthopraxy? And why do state measures designed to transform citizens' religious beliefs so often fail?

Her current work explores these issues through the lens of the reform of death ritual. In recent decades Singaporean cemeteries have become sites of acute contestation. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the state has ordered the destruction of every burial ground but one. In her book project, Transforming Grief: Life and Death in a Chinese Funeral Parlor, Toulson documents this unprecedented transformation of the religious landscape. Her ethnographic fieldwork focuses on families who receive the order to exhume, an event that many resist, believing that destroying a grave transforms ancestors into ghosts. Drawing on fieldwork in funeral parlors, Toulson also probe other shifts in Singaporean Chinese mortuary rites, examining why funerals have been simplified, "traditional" mourning garb has vanished, and ancestral altars have been removed from family homes. Broadly, her research invites scholars to rethink the scope of religious transformation and the shifting place of religion in a globalizing, rapidly transforming state. She examines how the religious and the political intersect, offering a new analysis of the connection between the dead body and the body-politic.