Martin Tsang, Ph.D

Cultural Anthropologist, Librarian, Curator, and Bead Artist

I am the Cuban Heritage Collection Librarian and Curator of Latin American Collections at the University of Miami Libraries.

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

I hold a secondary teaching appointment in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Miami and teach classes on religion; Latin America & the Caribbean; and the anthropology of religion. In 2021 I co-created and co-taught a graduate class on critical approaches, theories, and methods in archives. I am an 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]