Elizabeth A. McAlister

Not to be confused with Elizabeth McAlister.

Elizabeth A. McAlister
Born	1963
Education	Vassar College, B.A. 1985 Yale University, M.A. 1990 & 1992, M.Phil. 1993, PhD 1995
Employer	Wesleyan University

Elizabeth A. McAlister is a scholar of Religious Studies, and African-American studies, and feminist, gender, and sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She is known for her contributions in Afro-Caribbean religions, Haitian Vodou, Pentecostalism, race theory, transnational migration, Caribbean musicology, and evangelical spiritual warfare.

Education

McAlister earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Vassar College, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1985. She then attended Yale University for graduate school, supported with a McNeil Fellowship in Material Culture Studies. She received a Masters of Arts (M.A.) in African and Afro-American studies in 1990, an M.A. in History in 1992, an M.Phil. in American studies in 1993, and a PhD in American studies in 1995.

Career

After receiving her Ph.D., McAlister worked as a post-doctoral fellow with the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University from 1995 to 1996. In the fall of 1996, she joined the Religion Department at Wesleyan University. Since then, she has gone on to chair the University's African American Studies Department and the Religion Department. She has also served as director of the Center for African American Studies at Wesleyan. In 2008, she won the Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Her research has been funded with grants from The Pew Foundation, The Lilly Foundation, The Templeton Foundation Initiative on the Study of Prayer, organized by the Social Science Research Council. She also collaborated on building a digital archive of a Vodou temple in Port-au-Prince, called Espas Milokan, through the Princeton University Crossroads project.

Research

Professor McAlister's first book and many articles focus on Afro-Caribbean religions, especially Haitian Vodou. She studied Rara festivals in Haiti, creating a website based on her research to go along with her published book. McAlister co-edited a scholarly volume arguing for the historical importance of religion in the racial formations of the Americas. She has also written a number of articles on American Christian Evangelicals, the New Apostolic Reformation and the Spiritual Warfare movement.

Publications

Books

• McAlister, Elizabeth A. (2002). Rara! : Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-92674-5.
• McAlister, Elizabeth; Goldschmidt, Henry (2004). Goldschmidt, Henry; McAlister, Elizabeth (eds.). Race, Nation and Religion in the Americas. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514918-1.

Interviews

• "Perspectives on Haiti's Earthquake" in The New York Times, January 2010.
• “Religious Rituals: A Wesleyan Teacher Debunks the Myths about Voodoo” in The New York Times, January 19th, 2003.
• "Haitian Vodou Music and Ritual" in NPR: Fresh Air with Terry Gross, February 20, 1996.

Peer-reviewed articles and chapters

• "Necroscape and Diaspora: Making Ancestors in Haitian Vodou" in Timothy Landry, Eric Montgomery and Christian Vannier, eds., Spirit Service:Vodun and Vodou in the African Atlantic World. (Indiana University Press, 2022): 283–306.
• "Caribbean Women's Fugitive Speech Traditions" Women in French Studies Journal, Special conference issue, Dec 31, 2019: 25–35.
• "Race, Gender, and Christian Diaspora: New Pentecostal Intersectionalities and Haiti" in Judith Casselberry and Elizabeth A. Pritchard, eds., Spirit on the Move: Black Women and Pentecostalism in Africa and the Diaspora, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019: 44–64.
• "The Militarization of Prayer in America: White and Native American Spiritual Warfare" Journal of Religious and Political Practice. 1: 1 (2016): 114–130.
• "Possessing the Land for Jesus", in Paul C. Johnson, ed., Spirited Things: The Work of "Possession" in Black Atlantic Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014): 177–205.
• "Soundscapes of Disaster and Humanitarianism: Survival Singing, Relief Telethons, and the Haiti Earthquake", Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism 39 (Nov 2012): 22–38.
• "From Slave Revolt to a Blood Pact with Satan: The Evangelical Rewriting of Haitian History", Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 41:2 (June 2012): 187-215.
• "Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies", Anthropological Quarterly 85:2 (Spring 2012): 457–486.
• "Globalization and the Religious Production of Space", Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44:3 (Sept 2005):  249–255.
• "Love, Sex and Gender Embodied:  The Spirits of Haitian Vodou" in Nancy Martin and Joseph Runzo, eds., Love, Gender and Sexuality in the World Religions (Oxford:  Oxford Oneworld Press, 2000), 128-145.
• "The Madonna of 115th Street Revisited: Vodou and Haitian Catholicism in the Age of Transnationalism" in R. Stephen Warner, ed., Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration (Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 1998): 123-160.
• "A Sorcerer's Bottle:  The Visual Art of Magic in Haiti" in Donald J. Cosentino, ed., Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (Los Angeles:  UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995), 304-321

McAlister has also published numerous other articles, chapters, and interviews.

Albums

McAlister has produced three compilations of Afro-Haitian religious music: Rhythms of Rapture (Smithsonian Folkways, 1995), Angels in the Mirror, and the CD Rara that accompanies her first book.

External Links

• Professional Website
• Publications
• Rara! Website Companion to Published Book: Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora