Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Women’s and Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that fosters active analysis of how gender (together with race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, ability) affects our lives. WGS draws upon anthropology, art history, crime and justice studies, economics, history, literature, philosophy, political science, sociology, and the visual arts. WGS students reflect on how gender structures societies past and present and how it affects people at the individual and group levels; they study the historical factors that have shaped the status of women from varying backgrounds and countries; and they explore paths to achieve equality for all people.

Core Major Learning Outcomes

Explain the historical, social, and political contexts of women’s movements and feminist thought
Explain feminist theories and apply them in critiquing and transforming one’s world

Focus Area Learning Outcomes

Intersectional Gender Studies: Identify and evaluate the social construction of gender and the ways gender intersects with other forms of identity such as sexuality, race, class, ability and age in creating and maintaining structures of inequality.

Politics, Justice and Policy: Explain the gendering of our socioeconomic and political worlds and the individual and collective components of social change.

Cross-Cultural and Transnational Inquiry: Identify, compare, and evaluate culturally and historically specific ideas of gender, sex, and sexuality; and identify and examine ideas of gender, sex and sexuality that cross cultural and national borders.

Politics of Cultural Representation: Apply a feminist perspective to the study of literature, history, and/or the arts, with the aim of examing critically the multiple, situated kinds of knowledge that emergae from cultural artifacts and narratives.

Faculty

Anupama Arora, Professor of English & Women’s and Gender Studies
Elisabeth Arruda, Part-Time Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies
Heidi Berggren, Associate Professor of Political Science & Women’s and Gender Studies
Catherine Villanueva Gardner, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies & Philosophy; Chair, Women’s and Gender Studies
Anna Kłobucka, Professor of Portuguese & Women’s and Gender Studies
Cristina Mehrtens, Professor of History & Women’s and Gender Studies
Stephanie O’Hara, Associate Professor of French & Women’s and Gender Studies

Faculty Affiliates

Dário Borim Portuguese

Anna Dempsey Art History

Shari Evans English

Lisa Maya Knauer Sociology/ Anthropology

Yoon Soo Lee Design

Isabel P. B. Fêo Rodrigues Sociology/ Anthropology

Viviane Saleh-Hanna, Crime and Justice Studies

Matthew Sneider History

Bridget Teboh History

Heather Turcotte, Crime and Justice Studies

Timothy Walker History

Tryon Woods Crime and Justice Studies