Elizabeth Pérez is associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an ethnographer and historian of Afro-Diasporic traditions and LGBTQ religious experience. Her first monograph, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions (New York University Press, 2016) was awarded the 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, and received Honorable Mention for the Caribbean Studies Association’s 2019 Barbara T. Christian Literary Award. Her research has been published in several edited volumes and New West Indian Guide, Journal of African-American History, Journal of Religion in Africa, Nova Religio, Culture and Religion, Journal of Africana Religions, African and Black Diaspora, and Material Religion, among other journals. Her next book project examines the challenges faced by transgender people as religious actors in the contemporary United States.