Martin Tsang, Ph.D

Cultural Anthropologist, Librarian, Curator, and Bead Artist

I am a cultural anthropologist who has worked for the University of Miami Libraries as the Cuban Heritage Collection Librarian and Curator of Latin American Collections.

My doctoral research explored Afro-Asian religious formation and material culture in Cuba. I have recently worked on issues and responses to healthcare needs among Afro-Cuban religious practitioners.

I have taught in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Miami on religion and ethnography focusing on Latin America & the Caribbean. In 2021, I co-created and co-taught a graduate class on critical approaches, theories, and methods in archives. I am a senior Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School, and I am interested in print cultures and the history of the book in the circum-Atlantic.

With the rapid pace of the sugar industry showing no abatement during the early years of the nineteenth century, the demand for unfree labor in Cuba far outstripped its supply. Alongside the waning of the transatlantic slave trade, Spanish-owned plantations looked east for prospective Chinese workers, or coolies…[read more]