The graduate concentration in Women's and Gender Studies provides graduate students the opportunity to study gender and sexuality from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in conjunction with their study toward a master's or doctoral degree. Interdisciplinary by nature, Women’s and Gender Studies courses primarily address the diversity of gendered experiences based on race, ethnicity, class, religion, nationality, and sexual orientation. The graduate concentration is an appropriate option for graduate students who wish to focus on gender and/or sexuality in their particular disciplinary field.
The graduate concentration in Women's and Gender Studies is offered to students in the following programs: Master of Arts (M.A.) in American Studies, English, History, Liberal Studies, and Political Science; Master of Science (M.S.) in the Division of Global Affairs, Public Administration and Social Work; and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in American studies and the Division of Global Affairs.
The graduate concentration consists of a total of 12 credits. Students will take two courses cross-listed with Women's and Gender Studies from their own department and two core courses offered by the Women's and Gender Studies Program, taught by faculty members affiliated with the Graduate School.
The two core courses are:
Because the way that the graduate concentration in Women's and Gender Studies fits with each program is slightly different, students should seek advisement from the director of the graduate program in their own department as well as from the director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the beginning of their graduate studies. Full-time students should be able to complete the course of study for the graduate concentration in Women's and Gender Studies and for their master's or doctoral degree within their program's normal time frame.
Students interested in pursuing the graduate concentration in Women's and Gender Studies should contact the director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program after they have been accepted into the graduate program in their discipline.
The Women’s and Gender Studies Program offers its own activities to help students achieve learning goals, including brown-bag lunch discussions of student and faculty research and the annual WGS conference. The goals and assessments below for the English courses required for the Concentration are in addition to those above for all English MA students.
Learning Goal 1: Familiarity with the ways feminist epistemologies have reshaped the agendas of intellectual inquiry in numerous fields; command of the foundational methodologies of doing interdisciplinary work in WGS as well as those most appropriate to the student’s area of disciplinary study, including the lexicons required to do this work; understanding of the research and the research methodologies employed by scholars across the disciplines to study women’s and gender issues, and ability to use these tools competently in the student’s own academic work.
Learning Goal 2: Understanding in historical perspective of the issues in American and other cultures that are based on assumptions about male/female sexual differences, differences in gender and sexual orientation, and their ideologies; command of the intellectual history within which feminism and gender studies have come to be defined and reframed and the complex dynamic of women’s histories in various times and places as they intersect with gendered social and cultural formations; understanding of the development of feminist and gender theories in the contexts of differing cultures, subcultures, and global histories; and ability to apply contemporary varieties of these theories to literary and cultural texts with rigor, creativity, appropriateness, and critical thought.
Learning Goal 3: The ability to connect broader issues in women’s history, feminist and gender theory, and related theories and methodologies to literary works under study.
