Jeremy Jacob Peretz

Jeremy Jacob Peretz

Ph.D. in Culture and Performance

About

Jeremy's doctoral research explores intersections of religious and racial politics of personhood and group belonging within (neo/post-)colonial contexts. Primarily situated within both South Asian and African diasporas in the Americas, Jeremy's current project brings together issues of racism, religion, and cultural struggle in the Caribbean with a specific focus on Guyana, Britain’s former South American colony. Research for his master’s thesis centered on Guyanese ritual performances incorporated within the 2014 national commemorations marking the formal emancipation of enslaved Africans in British Guiana in 1834-38. The thesis analyzed popular and specialized Guyanese understandings of emancipation histories embodied through a local devotional ritual genre—called Komfa—as performed at a national venue.

Jeremy's critical and creative writings have appeared or are forthcoming in African American Review, Anthropology and Humanism, Caribbean Quarterly, International Journal of Cuban Studies, Journal of Africana Religions, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Karib, Moko Magazine, Obsidian, Postcolonial Text, Ufahamu, and elsewhere. Jeremy has received numerous awards and grants in support of his ethnographic field research, teaching, and writing. These include the 2016 Graduate Researcher Grant in Ethnic Studies offered jointly by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and the UCLA Institute of American Cultures, as well as Best Paper prize at the 2017 conference of the Guyana Institute of Historical Research. Jeremy's fieldwork within various Guyanese and Surinamese communities has also been recognized with the prestigous Ralph C. Altman Award from the Fowler Museum, where he recently served as lead curator for an exhibition featuring arts of Maroon peoples from Suriname in spring 2018.

Having taught nine different courses to UCLA undergraduates as a Teaching Apprentice in various departments and inter-departmental programs across campus, Jeremy has also worked since January 2016 as a Researcher at UCLA's School of Law. From 2014-2016, he was elected to two terms as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Ufahamu, UCLA's 50-year-old journal of African studies, after first serving on the publication's editorial board. After studying cultural anthropology as an undergraduate at UCLA, and prior to returning as a graduate student in the Culture and Performance program, Jeremy worked for over four years in Los Angeles Unified School District and for California's Department of Developmental Services designing, implementing, and monitoring programs supporting students with various disabilities. Jeremy is also an award-winning poet, a photographer, a proud parent, and a prudent student of ayurveda, for which he has received a certification after many years of study and practice.

Research Interests

Ethnography of religions; critical race studies; colonialism and empire; Caribbean studies; South Asian diasporic and African diasporic devotional and healing practices; ritual performance; belonging and othering; violence, trauma, and memory; museum and curatorial practices; disability studies; ethnographic poetry; arts activism; extralegal moral economies; environmental and food in/justice.

Education

BA | Anthropology | UCLA | 2009 (Cum Laude)

MA |Culture and Performance | UCLA | 2015

PhD | Culture and Performance | UCLA | Candidate