Elizabeth Pérez is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. Her first book, Religion in
the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic
Traditions (New York University Press, 2016) won the 2017 Clifford
Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion from the Society for the
Anthropology of Religion, and received Honorable Mention for the
Caribbean Studies Association’s 2019 Barbara T. Christian Literary
Award. She has published widely in scholarly journals and edited
volumes. Her current research project examines the challenges faced by
transgender people as religious actors in the contemporary United
States.