News
June 2017, WGSS graduate certificate student Lisa Rosenthal (PhD in Social and Health Psychology, Stony Brook University 2011) was just named a recipient of the George A. Miller Award for an Oustanding Recent Article on General Psychology by Division 1 (General Psychology) of the American Psychological Association. Lisa credits her coursework in WGSS for introducing her to the concept of intersectionality and for inspiring her areas of research. Lisa will give an invited address at the APA Convention in San Francisico in summer 2018. Read Lisa's article.
June 2017, WGSS Prof. Melissa M. Forbis is co-editing a special issue of WSQ on Protest. Here is the call for papers.
June 2017, WGSS PhD student Rachel Corbman presented a paper, "To Theorize As a Queer Feminist?," at the triennial Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities.
May 2017, WGSS Prof. Liz Montegary, WGSS PhD student Andy Eicher, and WGSS certificate student Brent Smith-Casanueva are all presenting papers at the 2017 Cultural Studies Association conference on Culture in the Age of Mass Debt (and Dealing with Trump). The CSA conference is being held from May 25-27 at Georgetown University.
May 2017, Extra special graduation kudos to Emily Whearty who earned an MA in Women's, Gender, and Studies this semester! After launching an MA in 2014, Emily is the second graduate student in the history of Stony Brook to complete an MA in WGSS. Thus far, all our MA candidates have completed the program in two years. Emily's culminating thesis is titled "Animating Food: Analyzing Choice, Control, and Disability."
May 2017, Congratulations to the class of 2017! This year, WGSS graduated one MA student, eighteen majors, and twenty-one minors. During convocation, Shaniza Nizam was awarded the Activism and Excellence award; Carinna Emilo won the Terry Alexander Award; and Masooma Kazmi and Matt Stern were acknowledged for their Academic Excellence. We hope all our students will keep in touch and send news and testimonials for the growing alumni section of our website!
May 2017, WGSS PhD students Rachel Corbman and Yalda Hamidi won this year's Vivien Hartog Best Graduate Student Teacher Prize. Awarded annually in the memory of WGSS certificate student Vivien Hartog, the $3000 award is given to the WGSS Ph.D. or certificate student who has not only received consistently high evaluations for their teaching, but has also demonstrated a strong commitment to social justice in and beyond the academy.
May 2017, Alex Novitskaya was awarded a GSO Travel award! The GSO travel awards are competitive awards that are given to graduate students who are presenting at prestigious international conferences in their area of research. Alex's award will allow her to attend the Queering Paradigms VIII Conference in Vienna this summer where she will present work on transnational academic solidarity in the fields of post-socialist studies and queer studies. Congratulations, Alex!
May 2017, WGSS professors, graduate students, majors, and alumni- including Victoria Hesford, Liz Montegary, Rachel Corbman, Stephanie Bonvissuto, Shruti Vaidya, Val Moyer, Yalda Hamidi, Jxhn Martin and Genie Ruzicka- are all teaching classes this year in our annual May Day- Free University. See the facebook event page for the full schedule and more information.
April 2017, WGSS certificate student Michelle Ho (advisor: Victoria Hesford) has been awarded a 2017-2018 MIT Diversity Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. Congratulations, Michelle!
April 2017, Eight WGSS majors and minors are participating in Stony Brook's undergrad research conference URECA this year! Drop by on April 26 to hear about projects by Joshua Bravo, Carinna Emilio, Jillian Ferretti, Jenna Kalvig, Alyssa Meano, Arani Nirmalan, Joe Seck, and Kalie Smith.
April 2017, WGSS prof. Liz Montegary's article "Cruising to Equality: Tourism, U.S. Homonationalism, and the Lesbian and Gay Family Market" was included in a special issue of WSQ on At Sea, edited by Terri Gordon-Zolov and Amy Sodaro. Liz's article is about Rosie O'Donnell's gay family cruise and the production of gay and lesbian parents as consumer citizens. WGSS certificate student Sofia Varino's "Aquapelagic Assemblages: Performing Urban Ecology with Harmattan Theater" (with May Joseph) was included in the same issue! There will be a launch party for the issue on May 11 at the New School.
April 2017, WGSS PhD student Alexandra Novitskaya just published "Patriotism, Sentiment, and Male Hysteria: Putin's Masculinity Politics and the Persecution Non-Heterosexual Russians" in Norma: International Journal for Masulinity Studies. Congratulations, Alex!
April 2017, WGSS PhD student Allyse Knox-Russell has been awarded a Humanities New York Public Humanities Fellowship for 2017-18! Her project, an outgrowth of pilot studies with Long Island environmental education programs, will be the development and implementation of an environmental justice curriculum for youth summer programs in Nassau and Suffolk Counties.
March 2017, Laura Abbasi-Lemmon, who completed her M.A. at Stony Brook in 2016, will be starting a Ph.D. program in Women's Studies at the University of Maryland in the Fall. Congratulations, Laura!
March 2017, WGSS doctoral candidate Rachel Corbman won a Mary Lily Research Grant from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, as well as a dissertation grant from the Schlesinger Library! Both grants will support research for her dissertation "Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969-1989."
March 2017, WGSS is one of the institutional co-sponsors of Duke's annual Feminist Theory Workshop, which will be help this year on March 24 and 25. WGSS offers Vivien Hartog travel grants to support the participation of Stony Brook grad students. This year, the Hartog awardees are Rachel Corbman, Allyse Knox-Russell, and Shruti Mukherjee. Check out photos of WGSS@SBU from FTW.
March 2017, Nancy Tomes- distinguished professor of History and associated faculty of WGSS- was awarded the Bancroft Prize for History for her book Remaking the American Patient (2016)!
March 2017, WGSS Prof. Nancy Hiemstra contributed "What Would You Do to Save Your Kids? The Outrage of Separating Immigrant Families at the Border" to HuffPost.
March 2017, WGSS Prof. Melissa Forbis and PhD student Rachel Corbman are on the planning committee of an upcoming Interference Archive exhibition on "Take Back the Fight: Resisting Sexual Violence from the Ground Up." The exhibition will open on June 1, 2017.
February 2017, Ula Klein- SBU English Ph.D. and WGSS grad certificate alum- was profiled this month in the faculty spotlight put together by Texas A&M's English department. Check out the placements of Ula and other graduates of the certificate program!
January 2017, Certificate students Sofia Varino and Joy Schaefer are curating the first New York Feminist Film Festival in March! Check out the full schedule.
December 2016, The new issue of Feminist Formations includes a dossier on Annmarie Jagose's Orgasmology (2012). WGSS Prof. Kadji Amin responds to Jagose's book with "Against Queer Objects."
December 2016, Lisa Diedrich's Indirect Action: Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS, and the Course of Health Activism was just published by University of Minnesota Press. Congratulations, Lisa!
November 2016, WGSS faculty Lisa Diedrich, Victoria Hesford, and Nancy Hiemstra, along with Cynthia Davidson and Kristina Lucenko from Writing and Rhetoric, are collaborating on Diversifying Wikipedia/Enhancing Online Education at Stony Brook. The project received a TALENT grant from TLT and the Faculty Center. Read more here.
November 2016, Stony Brook is introducing a new graduate certificate program in Disability Studies. Applications for Spring 2017 are being accepted now!
November 2016, Stony Brook will be well represented at the National Women's Studies Association conference this year in Montreal. WGSS graduate students Alexandra Novitskaya, Shruti Mukherjee, Allyse Knox, and Yalda Hamidi are all giving papers, as are certificate students Joy Schaefer, Kimberly Coates, and Liz Schmermund. WGSS chair Mary Jo Bona and associated faculty Shirley Lim will also give papers at the NWSA, while WGSS prof. Melissa Forbis will moderate a session on "Problematic Resistances: Re-Examining Postcolonial Imaginations in India and Russia" that features Alex and Shruti's papers.
October 2016, WGSS graduate students put out a CFP for "State of the Field: A Conference for Emerging Scholars in WGSS."
October 2016, WSQ published a special issue on "Queer Methods" that includes WGSS Prof. Kadji Amin's article "Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory's Affective Histories." There will be a launch party for the issue on December 8 at the LGBT Community Center in New York City.
October 2016, Joy Schaefer- a WGSS certificate student & winner of the 2016 Vivien Hartog teaching award- published "The spatial-affective economy of (post)colonial Paris: reading Haneke's Cache (2005) through Octobre a Paris (1962)" in Studies in European Cinema. Congrats Joy!
October 2016, WGSS graduate student Shruti Mukherjee presented her paper "Mother India: Constructing Hindutva Nationalism in Post-Colonial India" at the 45th Annual Conference on South Asia.
October 2016, WGSS graduate student Rachel Corbman participated in a symposuim on "Seeking Sex, Procuring Porn" at Fales Library.
October 2016, check out Lisa Diedrich's commentary on the election, "Illness as a Metaphor, 2016," on her blog.
October 2016, WGSS introduces a new semi-monthly brown bag series, put together by WGSS grad students Allyse Knox-Russell and Tara Holmes.
September 2016, This month, Nancy Hiemstra published a coedited book Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention: Critical Perspectives (with Deirdre Conlon) and a special issue of Professional Geographer (with Emily Billo). Congrats!
September 2016, Congratulations to Ritch Calvin, an Associate Professor of WGSS, on the publication ofFeminist Science Fiction and Feminist Epistemology: Four Modes (2016).
September 2016, WGSS PhD student Stephanie Bonvissuto presented her paper, "Whose Trans it it Anyway? The Power Inherent in Naming and the Struggle over Gender Identity,” at University of Arizona's International Trans*Studies conference.
September 2016, Rachel Corbman became the first WGSS PhD student at Stony Brook to advance to candidacy after passing her comprehensive exams with distinction.
September 2016, WGSS welcomes three new PhD students and one MA student to the department. Annu Daftuar, Val Moyer, and Shruti Vaidya are the third cohort of WGSS PhD students at Stony Brook. Our new MA student is Joie Meier.
August 2016, WGSS is now on Twitter! @WGSSSBU
July 2016, Mary Jo Bona, chair and professor of WGSS, was interviewed at Bretti and Oenotrians Museum in Consenza, Italy. Check out the video.
July 2016, Interference Archive did a podcast with WGSS PhD student Rachel Corbman about the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Here is a link.
June 2016, Prof. Nancy Hiemstra's class "Immigration Through a Feminist Lens" was included on Elle Magazine's list of 63 College Classes that Give Us Hope for the Next Generation.
May 2016, congratulations to graduating majors and minors, and the entire class of 2016! WGSS is pleased to announce that Raven Dorsey is the winner of this year's Terry Alexander Award in Women's and Gender Studies. The Terry Alexander Award is given annually to a major who has completed coursework in Gender, Sexuality, and Public Health, and is interested in a career in health care and/or health.
May 2016, congratulations to Laura Abbasi-Lemmon on the defense of her thesis. Read More.
April 2016, students in Prof. Melissa M. Forbis's class, The Global Game: Soccer and the Politics of Sports (CCS 325), went on field trip to see a NYCFC soccer game. WGSS PhD student Tara Holmes and Celia Marshik, a professor of English and affiliate of WGSS, joined the class on their trip! Read more.
April 2016, a number of our undergrads participated in URECA's annual symposium, celebrating undergraduate research and creativity. Joshua Bravo, Carinna Emilio, Jillian Ferretti, Maris Pozo, Shaniza Nizam, China Bailey, and Samhita Vupputuri all presented posters or projects. Read More.
April 2016, Bev Birns visits campus! Bev Birns was the first coordinator of Women's Studies at Stony Brook. She began her tenure as the coordinator in the late 1970s, while WST was housed in the Interdisciplinary Program in the Social Sciences. We have a library named in her honor. See photos.