Originally from Hancock in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Baird received B.A.'s in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, French and Francophone Studies, and Applied Linguistics at University of Michigan, graduating with High Honors. He has studied in Italy, Chile, Brazil, and Senegal and was the 2009 recipient of the Chiara Maria Levin Award for Breadth and Excellence in the Romance Languages. During his undegraduate career, he focused his free time on the situation of undocumented workers in Southwest Michigan, volunteering with several organizations as an English teacher, translator, and pesticide/health educator. His Honors thesis was entitled 'Más Chileno Que Los Porotos' and was a study of the contributions of Mapudungún and Quechua to the modern Chilean dialect of Spanish. In 2009 he received a Department of State Fulbright grant and spent the next two years teaching English in Fuenlabrada, Spain, a suburb of Madrid. Upon returning the USA, he took a position as Adjunct Spanish Faculty at Finlandia University in Hancock, MI. Baird is also a freelance translator and has worked for the George Wright Society. Baird’s MA thesis analyzed Chile's mainstream LGBT movement through the lens of hegemonic masculinity, exploring its deployment at three crucial moments in the country's modern LGBT movement. Baird earned his M.A. in Latin American Studies from Tulane in May 2014.
