/College of Arts and Sciences
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

WST Graduate Courses

 

Spring 2027 WST Courses

WST 601 - Feminist Interdisciplinary Histories and Methods

  • Instructor: Liz Montegary
  • Time: Tuesdays: 2:00-4:50pm
  • Description: Rather than beginning with an overview of the history of feminism or the feminist methodology, this course explores how feminist knowledges both settle and unsettle understandings of what counts as history, theory, method, and evidence. Since its emergence as a distinct academic field, feminism(s) have raised questions about how we know what we know, who gets to speak and for whom, and what constitutes a legitimate site or object of analysis. What makes research trans,queer, feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, or transnational? In this course, instructors and students do not seek definite answers to these questions. Instead, they trace the ways feminist thinkers intervene in debates about interdisciplinary knowledge production. They examine the relationship between power and knowledge: the ethics of representation, questions of accountability, the importance of self- reflexivity, and the recognition of knowledge production as an embodied and emotional practice. By centering subjects and knowledges often relegated to academic peripheries, this course challenges the situating of the west as feminisms epicenter and the racism, coloniality, and cisheteronormativity often embedded in feminist methods and histories.

WST 610 - Advanced Topics in Women's Studies - "Methods in WGSS"

  • Instructor: Angela Jones

  • Time: Wednesdays: 2:00-4:50pm

  • Description: This course introduces students to a wide range of methods and techniques for gathering and analyzing data in research and writing in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. This seminar is ideal for any PhD students interested in feminist approaches to research methods in the humanities and social sciences. Rather than focusing solely on methodology or the broad research strategy one adopts, this course helps students develop the skills needed to select and carry out methods and techniques appropriate to a research question. Students will also engage in hands-on activities that provide opportunities to practice various methods, tools, and techniques. This seminar rests on the idea that in graduate school, students should ideally learn the broadest repertoire of research methods possible, as developing these skills benefits their doctoral project and extends well beyond the dissertation. 

WST 610 - Advanced Topics in Women's Studies - "Chronic Conditions: Illness, Trauma, Climate Crisis"

  • Instructor: Lisa Diedrich

  • Time: Mondays: 2:00-4:50pm

  • Description: In this seminar, we will explore the chronic as a condition of the present moment. The word chronic describes a medical or physiological condition that is “continuing or occurring again and again for a long time” and which requires long-term attention and care. We will discuss specific medical conditions that are described as chronic (e.g., long Covid and ME/CFS), and the phenomenological experience of living with such conditions, as well as the more general ways that chronicity conditions our being in the world under late capitalism and late-stage American empire. We will consider how chronicity shapes experiences of illness, trauma, and climate crisis in the present historical conjuncture, and is a conduit across scales from bodies to relationships to infrastructures. At the same time, we will explore how artists, writers, and activists invent new chronic forms and genres to document and challenge the chronic conditions of the present. We will highlight collaboration as itself a chronic form and modality between sick and disabled artists and activists and their allies and co-conspirators across time and place. This course will engage with a range of texts and multimodal materials from a variety of interdisciplinary fields, including critical illness and disability studies, medical and health humanities, and gender and sexuality studies.

WST 698 - Practicing Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 

  • Instructor: Cristina Khan

  • Time: Thursdays: 2:00-4:50pm

  • Description: This teaching practicum is designed for PhD, MA, and graduate certificate students in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies who anticipate teaching interdisciplinary trans, queer, or feminist studies courses. Students will consider the development and institutionalization of our rich, yet relatively nascent field by taking seriously the responsibilities we have to recount and challenge white western-centric feminist genealogies upheld in the Euro-American academy. Together, instructors and students center feminist pedagogical practices that attend to the imperial and ableist legacies that underscore mainstream conceptualizations of teaching and learning. They reflect on how, as educators, their unequal relationships to colonialism, racial capitalism, and socially constructed identity categories inform their teaching philosophies and approach to designing courses, syllabuses, and assessments. This course also examines the changing politics and economics of contemporary academia and how these shifts impact the production, distribution, and consumption of academic knowledge. Ultimately, students will uncover the historical implications of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and start considering the role they wish to play in mapping the futures of the field.

 

Spring 2027 WST-Related Electives

If you see a course not listed here that you think might qualify as a WST elective, email the WST Graduate Program Director, Professor Angela Jones at angela.n.jones@stonybrook.edu.

EGL 509 - Studies in Language and Linguistics: "English Language in NYC"

  • Instructor: Simone Brioni
  • Time: Mondays 5:00-7:50pm

  • Description: This module explores how translation has been conceived throughout history and it focuses on how translation practices impact and relate to theory. Students will develop a good knowledge and practice of different types of translation – including interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation, and grasp the ethical dilemmas that translating entails.

EGL 586 - Topics in Gender Studies: "Gothic Females on Film: Modern Horror Movies By And About Women"

  • Instructor: Jeffrey Santa Ana
  • Time: Tuesdays 5:00-7:50pm

  • Description: This graduate seminar uses feminist film analysis and queer theory as its critical lens to explore the concept of “gothic females” in modern horror movies by and about women. According to feminist film studies scholars, gothic females in cinema “reclaim classic horror and psychological thriller tropes—such as the isolated mansion, the imperiled heroine, and the madwoman—to subvert patriarchal control. Instead of passive victims, female characters harness their own agency, often turning the very elements designed to oppress them into instruments of liberation” [Sharon Tay, “Constructing a Feminist Cinematic Genealogy: The Gothic Woman’s Film beyond Psychoanalysis,” in Women: A Cultural Review 14.3 (2003): 263-280]. We will view and examine modern horror films directed by women to understand how these films use the genre's tropes of horror and the uncanny to subvert patriarchal and heteronormative power structures and explore female empowerment, often through the archetype of the “Female Gothic.” To give us historical, cultural, and theoretical context for our analysis of gender and sexuality in modern horror films by and about women, we will read books and articles by feminist film studies scholars. Key elements for analysis and discussion include the “Final Girl” (Carol Clover’s concept of the lone surviving female characterized by her physical and emotional resilience, intelligence, and traditional “masculine” traits); gender fluidity, in which horror viewership crosses traditional gender lines; and the “monstrous feminine” (i.e., Barbara Creed’s argument that patriarchal societies portray female monsters in horror films as terrifying specifically because of their female reproductive and maternal bodies). Note: This course is an introductory film studies course for graduate students. You do not need to have taken a film studies course as a prerequisite for this course. We will read one film studies text book (Timothy Corrigan’s A Short Guide to Writing about Film, tenth edition), and we will also have background texts in feminist horror film studies to give us a better understanding of how to view and discuss the films in this class. 

SOC 518 - Sociology of Gender

  • Instructor: Kathleen Fallon
  • Time: Mondays 9:30-12:20pm

  • Description: This graduate seminar uses feminist film analysis and queer theory as its critical lens to explore the concept of “gothic females” in modern horror movies by and about women. According to feminist film studies scholars, gothic females in cinema “reclaim classic horror and psychological thriller tropes—such as the isolated mansion, the imperiled heroine, and the madwoman—to subvert patriarchal control. Instead of passive victims, female characters harness their own agency, often turning the very elements designed to oppress them into instruments of liberation” [Sharon Tay, “Constructing a Feminist Cinematic Genealogy: The Gothic Woman’s Film beyond Psychoanalysis,” in Women: A Cultural Review 14.3 (2003): 263-280]. We will view and examine modern horror films directed by women to understand how these films use the genre's tropes of horror and the uncanny to subvert patriarchal and heteronormative power structures and explore female empowerment, often through the archetype of the “Female Gothic.” To give us historical, cultural, and theoretical context for our analysis of gender and sexuality in modern horror films by and about women, we will read books and articles by feminist film studies scholars. Key elements for analysis and discussion include the “Final Girl” (Carol Clover’s concept of the lone surviving female characterized by her physical and emotional resilience, intelligence, and traditional “masculine” traits); gender fluidity, in which horror viewership crosses traditional gender lines; and the “monstrous feminine” (i.e., Barbara Creed’s argument that patriarchal societies portray female monsters in horror films as terrifying specifically because of their female reproductive and maternal bodies). Note: This course is an introductory film studies course for graduate students. You do not need to have taken a film studies course as a prerequisite for this course. We will read one film studies text book (Timothy Corrigan’s A Short Guide to Writing about Film, tenth edition), and we will also have background texts in feminist horror film studies to give us a better understanding of how to view and discuss the films in this class. 

PHI 500 - Feminist Theories: "Reading Foucault and Butler: Feminist Genealogies of Power and Resistance"

  • Instructor: Valentina Moro
  • Time: Wednesdays 5:00-7:50pm

  • Description: This seminar examines the intersections of power, embodiment, and political resistance through the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, as well as feminist thinkers who extend, revise, or challenge their methodological approaches. Tracing the ways in which power operates through institutions, discourses, and social norms, we will explore how bodies, identities, and forms of subjectivity are constituted and contested, and the way in which testimonial authority shapes conditions of recognition and political agency. The course also investigates collective practices of resistance, analyzing forms of protest, social movements, and organized political action through the lenses of feminist theories. Engaging authors such as Saidiya Hartman, Patricia Hill Collins, José Medina and others working at the intersection of epistemic injustice, social movements, and democratic struggle, we will consider how marginalized voices challenge dominant regimes of knowledge and create new possibilities for political transformation. 

PSY 559 - Psychology of Women's Health

  • Instructor: Marci Lobel
  • Time: Tues/Thurs 3:30-4:50pm

  • Description:  This course covers a variety of psychologically important topics in women’s health based on theoretical perspectives and current research findings.  We address psychological contributors to and consequences of women’s health and illness, focusing primarily on 1) diseases that affect women differently or disproportionately compared with men, 2) women’s reproductive health, 3) health behaviors, and 4) health care. We will reflect upon women’s intersectional identities involving their ethnicity/race, gender, sex, sexuality, culture, country of origin, class, family and work roles, reproductive status, etc., and how such intersectional identities affect women’s health. We will also consider perceptions and treatment of women in society, systematic barriers to the equality of women, and how these factors affect women’s health. *While terms such as woman and female may be used in these courses to refer to an individual who is capable of pregnancy and birth, we recognize and respect that not all individuals use these terms.