Amy Lind
Mary Ellen Heintz Endowed Chair and Associate Professor, Women's Studies
With the UC community since September 2006

Amy Lind is a new and exciting addition to the Department of Women’s Studies.  We recently caught up with Lind and asked her to share a bit of her personal side with us during this Women’s History Month season.  Her insightful responses follow…

UCWC: What three accomplishments are you most proud of?
AL: First, I'm simply proud of the fact that I have a PhD and teach in Women's Studies, a field I love and have always loved since I was in high school. In the realm of my professional career, I am probably most proud of the fact that I've received four Fulbright grants. These grants allowed me to spend over four years studying, conducting research and teaching courses in the Andes (Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador). I speak Spanish and regularly teach graduate courses in gender studies in Latin America; this academic and personal exchange with students has been absolutely invaluable to me. My first book was also an important accomplishment for me. It is based on my research on women's movements in Ecuador and is titled: Gendered Paradoxes: Women's Movements, State Restructuring and Global Development in Ecuador (Penn State Press, 2005).

UCWC: Which trait of your mother's would you most like to inherit?
AL:  Her open-mindedness, her ability to see various sides of an issue, and her skills at incorporating her open-minded vision into her volunteer and professional work. Her ability to survive difficult circumstances...and her ability to thrive despite the disadvantages she faced earlier in life.

UCWC: Where would you like to see women move to socio-economically in the coming years?

AL: This depends so much on which women you are talking about. Of course, for all women I'd like to see them "move up." I would like to work toward eliminating the enormous disparities in earnings between women and men but this cannot occur without addressing the structural - including racial, class, sexual and geopolitical - inequalities among socioeconomic classes and the fact that we are living in one of the most extreme times of income inequality in our country and globally. Those women who "make it" in the professional world are fortunate but we have a lot more work to do to address the underlying structural inequalities that keep the disadvantaged at a disadvantage in the first place....

UCWC: How do you presently contribute to bringing generations of women together?
AL: I contribute by bringing myself to the table, so to speak: by bringing my own identity into conversations with people I meet, into classroom discussions, by coming out, and  by not allowing others to suppress or render invisible my identity and experience. Also, I believe it is important to recognize and validate the contradictions that most people face in terms of our simultaneous access to privilege and the forms of oppression we experience - be it based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion or sexual identity.

The UC Women’s Center is proud to recognize Amy Lind’s contributions to campus.