Elizabeth Pérez

Elizabeth Pérez serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where her ethnographic and historical research centers on Afro-Diasporic religious traditions across the Americas including Cuban Lucumí, Brazilian Candomblé, and Haitian Vodou. Her work examines ritual practices, material culture, and the intersection of gender, race, and spirituality within the Black Atlantic world.

Pérez earned her undergraduate degree at Hampshire College, where she completed a thesis titled 'Cosa Sabrosa: The Writing of Saint Teresa of Avila,' establishing early foundations in vernacular Catholic studies that would inform her later work on Black Madonnas and Latinx Christianities.

Her research investigates the poetics of Caribbean altar displays, women's religious leadership, and the social life of religious objects—particularly chromolithographs of Black Madonnas. Current projects focus on transgender experiences within Afro-Diasporic traditions, exploring how gender-nonconforming practitioners navigate religious frameworks that simultaneously challenge and reinforce essentialist gender constructs.

Recent publications reveal evolving methodological approaches blending ethnography, poetry, and critical theory to examine vernacular Catholic iconography, trans religious archives, and the alimentary metaphors in Afro-Atlantic cosmologies. Her work consistently centers marginalized voices while interrogating colonial legacies in religious scholarship.

Pérez's scholarship has received significant recognition including the 2024 Leonard Norman Primiano Book Prize for The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract and the 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize for Religion in the Kitchen. She has also been honored with the 2022 LGBTQ-RAN Educational Resource Prize and multiple poetry award finalist positions.

• 2024 Leonard Norman Primiano Book Prize for The Gut
• 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize for Religion in the Kitchen
• 2022 LGBTQ-RAN Educational Resource Prize
• 2025 Alta California Chapbook Prize Finalist
• 2024 Cardinal Poetry Prize Finalist

Her University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship (2010-2011) supported foundational research on transgender religious practitioners, while ongoing projects examine remittance economies and the 'social life of things' within diasporic communities. Pérez's teaching includes specialized courses like 'Dark Goddesses & Black Madonnas' and 'The Virgin of Guadalupe: From Tilma to Tattoo,' connecting historical analysis with contemporary identity negotiations.

Though not explicitly structured around formal labs, Pérez's research emerges through sustained community engagement with religious practitioners in Chicago's South Side and transnational networks of Afro-Atlantic religious communities, emphasizing collaborative knowledge production with ritual specialists and marginalized religious actors.