Housed in the School of Arts & Sciences, the Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies program (GSWS) facilitates critical campus-wide curricular and co-curricular examinations of gender and sexuality. Our motivating goal is to encourage students, faculty and staff to interrogate interlocking systems of oppression, including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ethnocentrism and colonialism, to learn about their impact on campus and around the world and to practice resisting them.
Along with deploying a diverse set of feminist pedagogies, research methodologies and campus conversations, GSWS supports a curriculum that addresses topics such as histories of gender activism, gender, sexuality and their relationships to the law, religion, reproduction and reproductive technologies, marriage and relationships, war and violence, popular culture, literature, labor and the workplace, technology, social media, mental health, globalization and transnational experiences.
For more information, contact GSWS Co-Directors Lindsay Davis and Rebecca Moody.
Check out MA 1801 - Denksport: Sofya Kovalevskaya, For the Love of Math and Literature - taught by Francesca Bernardi in C23! MA 1801 is a 1/12 credit course open to all majors.
Core GSWS courses include:
Inquiry Seminars that count toward a GSWS HUA requirement include:
Additional courses that can count toward GSWS requirements include:
Dr. Lindsay Davis is a broadly trained interdisciplinary historian whose research interrogates the gendered, racial, and cultural foundations of the American prison state. Her current book project, "Lessons in Captivity: A Cultural History of Gender and Criminality During the Transitional Carceral Era, 1930-1973," examines the cultural coverage of women prisoners - in "real life" and in film - in an era preceding mass incarceration. In the classroom, Dr.
My research centers around religion in North Africa and the Middle East with a focus on Islam; I approach the study of Islam through its representation in visual culture. My first book project, an outgrowth of my dissertation, focuses on recent fiction film by Moroccan women filmmakers as oblique forms of resistance to dominant narratives about Muslim women. My research tends to be very interdisciplinary: I draw on religion, cultural studies, feminist theory, film theory and affect theory.
Crystal H. Brown earned her Ph.D. in Political Science with a focus in the subfields of Comparative Politics, International Relations, and U.S. Foreign Policy at the University of Oregon. She also has a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include comparative immigration and integration policies, human rights, refugees, race/ethnicity and politics, and international security studies.
Michelle Ephraim is the Shakespeare scholar at WPI. She is the author of Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage (Routledge, 2008) as well as numerous articles on 16th- and 17th-century literature. Professor Ephraim also teaches writing courses on Creative Nonfiction and Speculative Fiction (Sci-Fi/Horror/Fantasy). Her essays have appeared in publications such as the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, Lilith, Tikkun, The Morning News, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.