Elizabeth McAlister is Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University. Her first book is Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora (University of California Press, 2002), and is an ethnography of a musical, religious, and political festival in Haiti. Her second book, Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2004), is a volume co-edited with Henry Goldschmidt, which theorizes race and religion as linked constructs. McAlister has produced three compilations of Afro-Haitian religious music: Rhythms of Rapture, Angels in the Mirror, and Rara, the CD that accompanies her first book. She has been a member of the SSRC working groups on Religion and Migration and on Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life. She is currently participating in the New Directions in the Study of Prayer Initiative, researching what she terms “aggressive forms of prayer” in Evangelical spiritual warfare and in Afro-Haitian religion. Read Elizabeth McAlister's contribution to The new gurus.