Kathleen López specializes in the historical intersections between Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, focusing on postemancipation Caribbean societies, race and ethnicity in the Americas, international migration, and the history of the Chinese diaspora. She is completing her book manuscript on a transnational history of the Chinese in Cuba, based on archival and ethnographic research in Cuba, China, and the United States.  

Her most recent article is “The Revitalization of Havana’s Chinatown: Invoking Chinese Cuban History,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 5, no. 1: 177-200 (2009). She has co-edited a special issue of the Afro-Hispanic Review on “Afro-Asia” (Spring 2008) and published an article in the anthology The Chinese in the Caribbean (Markus Wiener, 2004). She serves on the Board of Advisers for the Dr. Shao You-Bao Overseas Chinese Documentation and Research Center, Ohio University Libraries. 

One focus of López’s current research is transnational Chinese Cuban family histories. In May 2009, she returned to the site of her dissertation fieldwork to present a paper at an international conference in Guangzhou and to facilitate the meeting between a Cuban of Chinese descent with her Chinese relatives at their ancestral home in a Guangdong village.