The American Anthropological Association (AAA) announced that Whitney Battle-Baptiste has been elected to serve as the organization‘s President-elect / Vice-President for 2021-2023. Battle-Baptiste will begin her tenure as President-Elect / Vice-President at the AAA Annual Meeting in Baltimore in November and will assume the position of Association President at the 2023 meeting.

Battle-Baptiste, professor of anthropology and director of the WEB Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst, is a historical archaeologist of African and Cherokee descent whose work focuses primarily on the intersection of race, class, and gender in the formation of cultural landscapes across diaspora Africa.

His long leadership experience within the Association includes members of the Ethics Committee, Nominations Committee and the Tourism Anthropology Interest Group, as well as the Association of Black Anthropologists and from the Association for Feminist Anthropology.

“I see myself as both an academic and an activist,” Battle-Baptiste said in an AAA announcement. “In this regard, I plan to accelerate the pace of change envisioned in the association’s new five-year plan, notably by taking definitive and concrete steps regarding the inclusion, equity and diversity of our members and by making advancing the field through a wide range of career paths. “

“Whitney has a wonderful history of service to the association and to the discipline,” AAA past president Akhil Gupta added in the announcement. “These experiences will be very useful to him in his efforts to shape the future of the association. “

As AAA president, Battle-Baptiste said she also hopes to use the association’s full convening power to facilitate a broader public role for anthropology.

Founded in 1902 and dedicated to the advancement of human understanding and the application of that understanding to the world’s most pressing problems, the American Anthropological Association, with 7,000 members, is the largest academic and professional organization in anthropologists to the world.