The Department of Gender & Women’s Studies provides an institutional home and an intellectual community to develop and disseminate knowledge about how gender shapes people’s lives including the lives of women (cis and trans), men (cis and trans), nonbinary & two spirit people, and people with other gender-expansive identities, through analysis of texts, social and cultural practices, and social institutions, both local and global, historical and contemporary. We explore the diverse empirical realities, embodiments, and creative meanings of gender, including in the arts, culture, medicine and health care, politics, and history in local and global perspective. We examine the structures of inequality and movements for social change, especially attuned to the intersections of gender and gender diversity with other dimensions of difference and inequality such as race, class, sexuality, disability, religion, and national origin.
We strive to support and produce first-rate and innovative scholarship. Only through research excellence can we understand the past, reveal and explain the present, and advocate for a better future. We share an investment in the centrality of feminist thought and of gender as a category of analysis. Committed to interdisciplinarity, we believe that multiple theoretical and methodological approaches can serve to illuminate shared problems in new ways and provide pathways toward their resolution.
We embrace the power of education as a way to shape the present and the future. We see the classroom as a potent site for the production of self-knowledge, and we also demand that students look through and beyond their own perspectives to understand the lives of other people across different locations, times, genders, sexualities, races, cultures, religions, and disability statuses. We believe that education and expertise does not flow in just one direction, but rather, our perspectives and claims are transformed through pedagogical engagement and sharing among all members of our community and beyond.