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Kate Ramsey is a Miami-based historian and anthropologist whose work centers on the Caribbean with a particular focus on Haiti. Her research interests include histories of religion and law, medicine and healing, anthropology and museums, and performance and visual art.

Ramsey’s first book, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago, 2011), centers on the history and legacies of penal and ecclesiastical laws against the Vodou religion in Haiti. It won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize, the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians, the Haitian Studies Association Haiti Illumination Project Book Prize, and a Médaille Jean Price-Mars from the Faculté d’Ethnologie, Université d’État d’Haïti. Ramsey is co-editor with Louis Herns Marcelin of Transformative Visions: Works by Haitian Artists from the Permanent Collection (Lowe Art Museum, 2015), and co-curated the exhibition by the same name. She has also published on mid-twentieth-century dance anthropology, focusing on choreographer Katherine Dunham’s research in the Caribbean, and the staging of “folklore” in mid-twentieth-century Haiti.

Ramsey’s current research is focused in two ways. One project studies the history of Vodou objects confiscated by U.S. marines during the 1915-1934 occupation of Haiti, and thereafter donated or sold to anthropology, natural history, and military museums in the United States and beyond. Based on collaborative research with Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, this project spotlights the interlinked histories of Afro-Caribbean religion, U.S. imperialism, and museum collecting during the early to mid-twentieth century.

Another project focuses on how early writing about and laws against Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices were shaped by medical theories of mind-body interaction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her article “Powers of Imagination and Legal Regimes against ‘Obeah’ in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean” (Osiris 36) emerges from this research. It was awarded the 2022 Percy G. Adams Prize of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the 2023 Forum for History of Human Science Article Prize Honorable Mention.

From 2006-2024, Ramsey was a professor in the Department of History at the University of Miami. Ramsey holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University and an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University. She can be reached at ramseykate19@gmail.com.

Recent Publications

Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. University of Chicago Press. 2011. [Link]

Kate Ramsey and Louis Herns Marcelin, eds., Transformative Visions: Works by Haitian Artists from the Permanent Collection. University of Miami Lowe Art Museum, 2015. [Link]

Kate Ramsey, “Powers of Imagination and Legal Regimes against ‘Obeah’ in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean.” In Osiris 36: Therapeutic Properties: Global Medical Cultures, Knowledge, and Law (2021): 46-63. [Link]

Kate Ramsey, “Prohibition, persecution et performance: Anthropologie et pénalisation du vodou au milieu du XXe siècle en Haïti,” Revue de la Sociéte Haïtienne d’Histoire, de Géographie et de Géologie nos. 267-274, sous la direction de Watson Denis (janvier 2018-décembre 2019): 170- 201. [Link] 

Kate Ramsey, Virtual Roundtable Contributor, “Vodou in Translation,” Haiti in Translation Series, H-Net (2018). [Link]

Kate Ramsey, “Biography of Jean-Léon Destiné.” In The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 335-337. [Link]

Kate Ramsey, “Without One Ritual Note: Folklore Performance and the Haitian State 1935-1946.” In Caribbean Popular Culture: Power Politics and Performance. Yanique Hume and Aaron Kamugisha, eds. (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2016), 203-230. [Link]

Kate Ramsey, “Katherine Dunham and the Folklore Performance Movement in Post-U.S. Occupation Haiti.” In Katherine Dunham: Recovering an Anthropological Legacy, Choreographing Ethnographic Futures. Elizabeth Chin, ed. (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2014), 51-72 [Link]

Kate Ramsey, “Duverneau Trouillot: Ethnographe révisionniste du Vodou.” In Production du savoir et construction sociale: l’ethnologie en Haïti. Jhon Picard Byron, ed. (Port-au-Prince: Éditions de l’Université d’État d’Haïti; Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2014), 13-20. [Link]

Kate Ramsey, “Vodouyizan Protest An Amendment to the Constitution of Haiti.” In The Journal of Haitian Studies 19, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 272-281. [Link]

Kate Ramsey, “Vodou, History, and New Narratives.” In Transition Magazine 111: New Narratives of Haiti (2013): 31-41. [Link]

Kate Ramsey, “From ‘Voodooism’ to ‘Vodou’: Changing a US Library of Congress Subject Heading.” In The Journal of Haitian Studies 18, 2 (Fall 2012). [Link]

Kate Ramsey, “Prohibition, Persecution, Performance: Anthropology and the Penalization of Vodou in Mid-Twentieth-Century Haiti.” In Gradhiva: Revue d’anthropologie et de muséologie 1 (nouvelle série) (Winter 2005): 165-179. [Link]

Media Coverage

Social Media

Country Focus

Haiti and the Caribbean

Expertise by Geography

Caribbean

Expertise by Chronology

18th century, 19th century, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Art & Architectural History, Colonialism, Law, Libraries & Archives, Material Culture, Medicine, Museums, Rebellion & Revolution, Religion, Science, Slavery