Amy C. Lind

Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, United States

Statement

I am honored to be nominated for the position of Treasurer of the Latin American Studies Association. I have been active in LASA since 1991, having missed only two conferences since I first joined the association. I have been active in several sections and have served in elected and appointed positions for LASA in the past, including as co-chair of the Gender and Feminist Studies section (2007-09), treasurer and member of the executive committee of the (then named) Gay and Lesbian Studies section (2000-03), appointed member of the President’s Human Rights Task Force (2004-06), Track Chair for Gender and Sexuality Studies (2001) and later Track Co-Chair for Feminist Studies (2006). The intellectual work and space of LASA has certainly been generative for me and has enriched my academic career over the years. In so many ways, it has been an important interdisciplinary academic home for me. I look forward to the opportunity to serve as a member of the Executive Committee and to help LASA move forward with its goals to foster intellectual discussion, research and teaching on Latin America, the Caribbean, and its people throughout the Americas; to promote the interests of LASA’s diverse membership; and to encourage civic engagement through network building and public debate.

I have relevant professional experience that prepares me well to serve as treasurer. As Head of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at the University of Cincinnati (UC), I am the fiduciary for our near $1.3 million endowment and an annual operating budget of $260,000, which includes Friends of WGSS endowed and discretionary funds, UC Taft Research Center department-designated funds, graduate assistantships, faculty grant funds, and general funds. As department head, I manage 37 people including faculty, staff, and graduate students, and each year I assign graduate student allocations. I have also served for the past two years on the College of Arts & Sciences Budget and Planning Advisory Committee which advises the Dean on the college budget, which operates within the institutional context of performance-based budgeting. From August 2017 through September 2018 I took on an additional role as Provost Fellow, in which capacity I oversaw reaccreditation in the College of Arts and Sciences, in anticipation of our Higher Learning Commission campus visit in September 2018. In this capacity, I worked with Vice Provost of Undergraduate Affairs and advised the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences on strategies for preparing the twenty-one departments in the college for reaccreditation. My new position as Taft Center Director and Chair of Taft Faculty is the result of a very generous endowment of $38 million from the Taft family, and my annual budget is $1.3 million.

I am excited to work with the President, Vice-President, Executive Committee, and additional committees to best align LASA’s resources with its strategic direction, to continue in the tradition of seeking and providing resources for participants from Latin American countries and under-represented groups more generally, and to find creative solutions to resourcing innovative interdisciplinary, transgressive, and hemispheric scholarship.