Elizabeth Pérez

Associate Professor, UC Santa Barbara

Elizabeth Pérez is an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in the study of LGBTQ spiritual experience and Afro-Diasporic religions like Vodou and Lucumí. Her first book, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, & the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions, won the 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion. In 2022, she received the LGBTQ-RAN Educational Resource Prize for “Queering the Spirit: LGBT Religious History.” Her second book, The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract, was recognized in 2024 with the American Folklore Society’s inaugural Leonard Norman Primiano Book Prize on Vernacular Catholicism.