Melissa Birch

Melissa H. Birch retired as the Provost Fellow for international external engagement at the Office of International Affairs and  Associate Professor at the School of Business at the University of Kansas in Fall 2026. She taught courses on International Business, Business in Latin America, and Corporate Strategy. Her research focuses on the challenges of management in Latin America, and she has published in both the U.S. and Latin America on topics including public sector management, privatization, and regional integration. She is appointed by the US Secretary of Commerce as member of the MidAmerica District Export Council and serves on the Kansas International Trade Coordinating Council, an advisory group to the Governor. Birch was the recipient of the 2002 Provost's Award for Leadership in International Education and served as Director of KU's nationally designated Center for International Business Education and Research from 1999-2011. She was elected President of the Association of International Business Education and Research (AIBER), the association of all CIBERs, in 2005. Birch received a Fulbright lecturing/research grant to conduct research in Paraguay in 2004, where she taught in a new master's degree program in public and business administration at the Catholic University and collaborated on the development of curriculum for this program. Birch came to KU after teaching at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia for over ten years. She also worked as a consultant for organizations including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, and KPMG Peat Marwick. She is past president of the Business Association of Latin American Studies, a member of the Latin American Studies Association's Task Force on Scholarly Relations with Paraguay, a Contributing Editor for Brazil to the Handbook of Latin American Studies, and a member of the Editorial Board of the Latin American Business Review. She holds a B.A in Anthropology and Latin American Studies from New College in Sarasota, Florida and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois.