Dear LACIS Community,
As I come to the end of my term as Faculty Director of Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies, I have been thinking a great deal about what a privilege it has been to serve this community.
LACIS is, of course, a program—but it is also much more than that. It is a community of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and partners who care deeply about Latin America, the Caribbean, and Iberia and who believe in the importance of sustained, rigorous, and engaged scholarship about these regions. Over the course of my term, I have had the opportunity to see again and again the extraordinary range of work that happens through LACIS: in our classrooms, through faculty and student research, in public programming, outreach, in language study, through international partnerships, and in our relationships with communities well beyond campus.
I am enormously grateful to the LACIS staff, whose knowledge, creativity, patience, and commitment make so much of this work possible. I am equally grateful to our affiliated faculty and instructors, who contribute their time and intellectual energy to building a genuinely interdisciplinary community, and to our students, whose questions, curiosity, and enthusiasm continually remind us of the importance of what we do.
One of the things I have valued most during my time as Faculty Director has been the opportunity to work across departments, disciplines, and communities. Area studies programs like LACIS create a kind of intellectual space that is increasingly rare and increasingly necessary. They ask us to think across boundaries—disciplinary, linguistic, national, and institutional—and to understand places and people through histories and relationships that cannot be reduced to a single field of study. At a moment when universities are contemplating what international and area studies mean and why they matter, I remain deeply convinced of the importance of this work.
I am also very happy to welcome Professor Victor Goldgel-Carballo as the next Faculty Director of LACIS. Victor is a brilliant scholar and a generous colleague who brings tremendous intellectual curiosity, creativity, and commitment to interdisciplinary work. I am excited to see the directions he will take the program, and I know that LACIS will be in excellent hands under his leadership.
There is something humbling about serving as the director of a program with such a long history and such a broad community. Any period of leadership is only one moment in a much longer collective project. I am grateful to those who built LACIS before me, to everyone who has worked alongside me during these years, and to those who will carry the program forward.
Although I am stepping away from the Faculty Director role, I am not stepping away from LACIS. I look forward to continuing to be part of this community—as a faculty affiliate, colleague, teacher, and enthusiastic supporter of the work ahead.
Thank you for your trust, collaboration, ideas, and friendship. It has been a genuine honor to serve as Faculty Director.
With gratitude,
Sara L. McKinnon
Outgoing Faculty Director
Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies
University of Wisconsin–Madison