Martin Tsang, Ph.D

Cultural Anthropologist, Librarian, Curator, and Bead Artist

Cultural Anthropologist · Librarian · Curator · Bead Artist

I am a cultural anthropologist whose work spans scholarship, archives, cultural heritage, and material practice. I have held faculty and curatorial roles at the University of Miami Libraries, where I worked with the Cuban Heritage Collection and served as Curator of Latin American Collections, supporting research, teaching, and public engagement around one of the largest collections of materials on Cuba and its people located outside the island.

My doctoral research examined Afro Asian religious formations and material culture in Cuba, with a focus on ritual practice, transnational histories, and objects as sites of meaning. More recently, my work has engaged questions of health, care, and community based responses among Afro Cuban religious practitioners. Since then, I have gone on to author more than 35 publications relating to my research and academic interests that span different genres, styles, of writing, and audiences.

I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses in the Departments of Anthropology and Religious Studies at the University of Miami, focusing on religion and ethnography in Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2021, I co-created and co-taught a graduate seminar on critical approaches, theories, and methods in archival practice.

In addition to my academic work, I served as a Senior Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Division of Preservation and Access. In that role, I designed and led national programs supporting cultural preservation, community documentation, education, and digital and public humanities initiatives. I co-designed and led NEH’s Cultural & Community Resilience award program, which provided funding for communities to record their pandemic and environmental event experiences through oral histories and other means. I directed approximately $11 million in active awards and partnered with universities, museums, community archives, public libraries, historical societies, and media organizations to strengthen infrastructure, expand access, and support the sharing of cultural collections.

Alongside my scholarly and curatorial practice, I maintain an active and expanding body of work in the visual arts and art history. As a bead artist, my practice centers on beads as my chosen medium, which have thick histories in relation to humanity and culture, while also extending into other material and sensory forms. I create, teach, lecture, and exhibit my work, engaging beads as both aesthetic objects and carriers of social, spiritual, and historical meaning rooted in Afro Atlantic religious traditions and craft lineages.

My artistic and collaborative projects include contributing an essay to the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of the Cuban Chinese artist Wifredo Lam, When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream, creating and installing a bespoke scent intervention for artist Woody De Othello’s exhibition coming forth by day at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and producing beaded works that will be on view in spring at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino, with the pieces entering the museum’s collection. I continue to work within and beyond the boundaries of the art historical canon, seeking new ways to bring Afro Atlantic religious beadwork into museums, exhibitions, and public discourse, engaging new audiences and contributing to a more inclusive global artistic record.

I am a Senior Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, where my interests include print cultures, bibliography, and the history of the book in the circum-Atlantic world.

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]