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Fall 2025 Graduate Courses
[Core Courses]
WST 601 - Feminist Theories
Joanna Wuest
Tuesdays: 2:00-4:50pm
This course examines concepts and conversations that have played a key role in constituting
the field of women's, gender, and sexuality studies and queer, feminist, and trans
scholarship more broadly. Far from promising a definitive or comprehensive overview
of feminist theory, each iteration of this course focuses on particular topics, themes,
and/or theoretical frameworks. As such, instructors model for students how to build
reading lists that track conceptual debates within the field or trace the contestations
and contradictions of particular feminist genealogies. Together, instructors and students
situate these concepts and conversations within broader historical, geopolitical,
and intellectual contexts in order to question the purpose of specific theories at
the moment of their emergence and to evaluate their current usefulness for developing
transnational and intersectional understandings of gender and sexuality. At its core,
this course attends to the ways in which the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and
cisheteronormativity have conditioned western feminist thought and seeks to support
students in developing theoretical tools for practicing distinctly anti-racist and
decolonial women's, gender, and sexuality studies.
WST 610 - Advanced Topics in Women's Studies - "Autoethnography as Black Feminist
Method"
Angela Jones
Wednesdays: 2:00-4:50pm
This course introduces graduate students to Black feminist methods and situates autoethnography,
using experiential knowledge, as part of an enduring Black feminist tradition. Students
will learn various techniques for conducting autoethnography and writing autotheory
and read Black feminist texts using these methods. The course material raises intriguing
questions regarding ethics and vulnerabilities, which we will discuss and debate.
This is a professor-led, discussion-based course, with no student presentations. The
course is designed to assist students in writing a publishable paper using autoethnographic
methods for journals such as the Journal of Autoethnography and other subject-specific journals.
WST 680 - Interdisciplinary Research Design
Jenean McGee
Thursdays: 2:00-4:50pm
This seminar is designed as a workshop to apply knowledge of methods and methodologies
in the interdisciplinary area of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies to students’ own research. The class will introduce students to university
structures, to expectations and obligations, to various modes of writing and engagement,
and ultimately to the conceptual process of envisioning a dissertation project and
the practical steps involved in crafting a dissertation prospectus. Over the course
of the semester, students will receive practical training regarding what exams are
for, how to construct exam lists, and how to craft a dissertation proposal. Further,
students will complete a series of activities and assignments devised to help them
begin to think about their dissertation topic, including research material, research
methods, research questions, and how (and when) to produce a prospectus (now part
of the qualifying exams). Additional training will include writing journal abstracts,
conference abstracts, and other field-appropriate activities. Students are expected
to work collaboratively, presenting their individual works-in-progress to the class
for constructive critique. Over the semester, students will develop either a research
proposal for funding agencies and/or their dissertation proposal (prospectus).
[WGSS-Related Electives]
EGL 586 - Topics in Gender Studies- "Ecofeminism, Environmental Justice, Literature
and Film"
Heidi Hutner
ONLINE
In this class we will read essays on ecofeminism and environmental racism, and read
contemporary literature and watch films focused on environmental issues. We will study
current environmental issues: toxic and radioactive pollution, climate change, animal
rights, food justice, environmental justice, and ecofeminism. Students will give a
presentation, create an annotated bibliography, and write a long essay.
EGL 603 - Problems in Lit Theory & Criticism - "Literature, Memory, & The Environment"
Jeff Santa Ana
Mondays 2:00-4:50pm
This course focuses on some of the ways in which contemporary literature represents
the environmental changes and losses that have already occurred, that are upon us,
and those in the future. By reading history and criticism as well as narrative and
nonfictional prose, we will examine environmental experience and literary depictions
of the environment as features of remembering in the contexts of postcolonialism and
decolonization, human migration and diaspora, and gender and sexuality (queer) studies.
We will address why and how the study of memory in literature and criticism enables
us to consider environmental crisis as an injustice of colonial oppression, imperialism,
poverty, and social marginalization. We will investigate these concerns in relation
to questions at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race as they apply to
discourses in eco-politics, environmental activism, and the collective memory of violence
and human casualties that have occurred under colonialism, imperialism, and militarist
and capitalist processes of extraction. Some of the questions we will address are:
how do literary representations of environmental crisis and catastrophe help us to
recover the suppressed bodies of colonial violence and extractivism? How do these
writings “remember” centuries of Western imperialism as a decolonization critique
of environmental degradation—of an environmental crisis caused by global climate change
that is largely the consequence of Western powers? Environmentalist scholars have
asked us to consider the elusive effects of climate change and ecological catastrophe,
but how do we critically assess environmental crises that evade historical contexts
in imperialism and span beyond readily imagined temporal periods? In what ways can
our grief, memory, and memorialization drive visions and enactments of alternative
futures? The course will address these and other questions through four thematic units:
1) Theorizing Memory in Literature and Environmental Criticism; 2) Memory and the
Natural World in Postcolonial and Decolonial Contexts; 3) The Gender (Ecofeminist)
Politics of Remembering and Environmental Apocalypse; and 4) Memory and the Natural
World in a Queer Studies Context.
PHI 615 - Philosophy and Feminism - "Feminist Readings on Care: Politics & Ethics"
Valentina Moro
Mondays: 5:00-7:50pm
This course examines feminist approaches to care and vulnerability as fundamental
ethical, political, and social concepts. Drawing from feminist philosophy, Black studies,
critical theory, and the politics of care, we will explore how vulnerability is distributed
across bodies, communities, and institutions, as well as the ways care can serve as
both a transformative practice and a site of power. Readings will engage with scholars
such as Judith Butler, Christina Sharpe, Adriana Cavarero, and Sara Ahmed to critically
analyze embodiment, violence, motherhood, labor, and collective resistance. Through
these discussions, we will interrogate how vulnerability and care shape contemporary
struggles for justice and alternative models of solidarity.
SOC 591 - Special Seminars - "Social Movements & Collective Behavior"
Manisha Desai
Wednesdays: 2:00-4:50pm
Description TBA
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