News & Events

• Event Start Date: August 30, 2023
• Event Start Time: 1:00 PM
• Event End Time: 2:30 PM
• Event Location: 160 Ryders Lane, First Floor Seminar Room

As summer winds down, the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies invites faculty, staff, and continuing students to gather in celebration of our incoming MA and PhD cohort. Let’s kick off the academic year with good food and great company.

This informal lunch offers a chance to connect, share insights, and welcome new graduate students into the WGSS community.

• Event Start Date: September 11, 2023
• Event Start Time: 12:30 PM
• Event End Time: 2:00 PM
• Event Location: Conference Room, Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building 162 Ryders Lane, New Brunswick, NJ

Join us in welcoming new colleagues and celebrating the vibrant WGSS community at Rutgers. This festive lunch offers a chance to reconnect, meet incoming students and faculty, and kick off the semester together.

📝 RSVP by September 6

• 
• Event Start Date: April 27, 2023
• Event Start Time: 3:30 PM
• Event Location: 15 Seminary Place, Academic Building West Wing, Room 6501

As of 4/24, this event has been postponed to a later date.

Global Asias is honored to invite you to a book talk on April 27 with Juliana Hu-Pegues on Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. The talk will be held at 15 Seminary Place, Academic Building (West Wing) 1170, from 2:00-3:30pm. Hu Pegues is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University, and recently won the 2022 Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association for this monograph. 

The talk will feature discussants ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow Evelyn Autry and Childhood Studies PhD candidate Rashmi Kumari, and is moderated by Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies PhD candidate Mich Ling. There will be a graduate luncheon prior to the talk and an open reception with snacks following. If you'd like to attend any of the events, please RSVP here.

The event is organized by the GLAS Cold War Asias Graduate Working Group and is co-sponsored by the Global Asias Institute, the Institute for Women's Leadership, American Studies, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, History Department, and the Indigenous Working Group at the Center for Latin American Studies

• Event Start Date: November 16, 2022
• Event Start Time: 5:30 PM
• Event End Time: 7:00 PM
• Event Location: Online via Zoom

Celebrate the launch of Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon by Dr. Maya Mikdashi, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. This virtual event brings together scholars to discuss the book’s critical insights into the intersections of sexuality, religion, and state power in Lebanon.

Panelists:

• Mayanthi Fernando (UC Santa Cruz)
• Marisa Fuentes (Rutgers University)
• Laleh Khalili (Queen Mary University of London) Moderator: Arlene Stein (Rutgers University)

🔗 Join via Zoom Meeting ID: 995 6170 4081 Passcode: 507809

📧 For more info, contact Aretha Overton Clark: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

• 

• Fall_2022_Welcome_Back_Letter.pdf

  September 6, 2022

  Dear WGSS community,

  As we begin this new school year, I want to extend a warm welcome to the new members of our community and to those who are returning. We are coming together in person as a community for the first time in two-and-a-half years, and in the midst of the continuing challenges of the pandemic, attacks on reproductive justice and LGBTQ+ communities coming from the Supreme Court and into people’s everyday lives, ongoing war, gun violence, and violence against communities of color. As I wrote last year, through it all, our community continues its work of teaching, activism, institution-building, research, writing and providing new understandings of the world and envisioning new ways of being, struggling, and building beauty and justice. Thank you for all that you do, collectively, to interrogate power and work for justice. Your work, in all its facets, is an inspiration for everyone.

  I also extend my thanks and gratitude to our WGSS staff members –Monique Gregory, Feronda Orders and Crystal Smith—for carrying the work of the department throughout. Up until now, the staff has been working remotely to support the department. As of September, they will be back in person under the new FlexWork program. Someone will be in the office five days a week, and we will post hours and contact information, as well as each staff members flex schedule, on the office door and in staff email signatures. In the next few weeks, as we say goodbye to Crystal, whose last day was August 19, we hope to welcome a new Program Coordinator to support the Undergraduate and Graduate Programs.

  It is with deep gratitude that I introduce our leadership team for this year. As most of you know, since January Ed Cohen has been serving as WGSS Graduate Program Director, and I want to extend my thanks and profound appreciation for his leadership, his dedication to our students, and his deep engagement with WGSS graduate education and our intellectual mission, and my happiness that he will be continuing in this position for the next year. This semester, our (newly award-winning!) Undergraduate Program Director, Kyla Schuller, is on sabbatical, and I want to extend a warm welcome to Dana Luciano as our Interim Undergraduate Program Director, and am thrilled to announce that, as of January 1, Dana will be taking on the role of Associate Undergraduate Director and will continue supporting our students and curriculum upon Kyla’s return. I also want to extend my profound thank you to Ileana Nachescu for the wonderful work she has done as our Assistant Undergraduate Director, and to welcome her back from sabbatical. Our MA Director, Julie Rajan, is also on sabbatical, and I am deeply grateful to our newly-minted Associate Professor, Maya Mikdashi, for stepping in as Interim MA Director for the Fall semester –thank you, Maya! I also want to congratulate our dear colleague Judy Gerson on her retirement –and to let you all know that Judy will continue to be in her office this Fall as she organizes and compiles her archive as a founding member of our department, which will be housed in the Rutgers Libraries. Thank you, everyone, for your service and for making this such a thriving department!

  I am thrilled to announce that we have two postdoctoral fellows joining us this year, Evelyn Autry and Jaime Coan. Welcome back to our very own Evelyn Saavedra Autry, who, after joining as an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow in 2020 and as a WGSS-SAS Fellow in 2021, now joins us as a 2022-2024 Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow. Evelyn has a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Georgia, and has taught at Fisk University, Tennessee Tech University, Middle Tennessee State University, and the University of Georgia. Evelyn’s research examines representations of indigenous women in cultural productions of the Peruvian Internal Armed Conflict (1980-2000). Evelyn employs decolonial approaches and testimonial literature to focus on the systematic oppression of indigenous women, indigenous feminism, trauma and memory studies, indigenous popular art, Latinx studies and testimonial literature. Welcome to Jaime Shearn Coan, who comes to department as the Institute for Global Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow from 2022-2024. Jaime has a Ph.D. from the City University of New York (CUNY)

  and has been the Communications Manager for the ONE Archives Foundation. Jaime’s groundbreaking work on live performance as an alternative site of AIDS historiography, and in particular, his focus on Black queer performance in the 1980s as embodied archive, opens up generative avenues for collaboration with our faculty and graduate students alike. We are super-excited to have Evelyn and Jaime as part of our community, and very much look forward to hearing more about their work over the course of these next two years!

  I am thrilled to congratulate our newly-promoted colleagues, Brittney Cooper and Carlos Decena, to the rank of Full Professor, and Maya Mikdashi, to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. It is such a pleasure and an honor to have you as colleagues. Welcome back and congratulations to all!

  We are delighted to welcome our two new Ph.D. students, Lu Rose Biltucci and David Carré, and our ten new MA candidates, Aakanksha Bhatter, Erin Aufrichtig, Tazmine Weisberger, Aven Watters, Maira Asif, Jillian Boyle, Ryleigh Stull, Sarah Vamvounis, Bandana Devi, and Kim Anh Nguyen. Their collective interests include anti-Blackness, Black queer ontology, Black affect, and the archives of Black queer Caribbean diaspora; technologies of cartography, Equatorial zones and racialized environmental classifications; gender violence and the climate crisis; gender, development and economic empowerment; queer being, queer family formation, queer kinship and queer disruption; intersectional activism; gender formations of public policy, US politics, and administration; gender, identity and political representation; sexual and reproductive health and rights; gender and LGBT+ cultural history, disabled and chronically ill communities; sex education; women in the work force, reproduction, and sexual violence against women; and immigration policy and reform. We are excited to work with them and to support the incredible range of interdisciplinary work that takes place in our department.

  On Monday, September 19, from 10 am-12 noon, we will have our in-person faculty meeting, and we look forward to welcoming you with breakfast and lunch. For this first faculty meeting of the year, it will be a delight for us to welcome Dean Rebecca Walkowitz to WGSS to celebrate the beginning of the academic year. It will be wonderful to have the chance, after such a long time, to greet all of you in person and to welcome Dean Walkowitz to our community!

  Please follow us on social media to keep up with departmental and consortium events –and let Feronda know about any upcoming events you have planned so that she can share them on social media. Before the semester starts, have a look at our WGSS Feminist Playlist on Spotify and send Feronda and me any favorite songs that you would like to add so that we can update our playlist and circulate this newest version over our social media channels, so that we can listen, dance, and continue to be inspired by feminist grooves throughout the year!

  Thank you, everyone, as always, for all that you do! I look forward to continuing our work together and to seeing many of you in person after such a long time apart.

  Warm regards,

  Ethel Brooks

  Chair

Virtual Panel on Transnational Feminist Practices Against War: 20 Years Later on September 14, 2021

• 

• The Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University stands in solidarity with Asian-Americans and against anti-Asian violence and attacks on Asian-American communities that have increased over the last year. Across the country, Asian-Americans, mostly women, have been targets of hate crimes ranging from verbal and physical assault to murder. This past week in Atlanta, eight people were murdered, six of them Asian-American massage workers, targeted by a white supremacist misogynist whose acts have been excused and facilitated by politicians, the police, religious extremists, and the general climate of anti-Asian racism, harassment, scapegoating and targeting that has been on the rise over the past year.

  The violence and hate directed toward Asian-Americans has a long history in the United States, from the 1854 legal ruling of People vs. Hall and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II, to attacks on Vietnamese shrimpers in the 1970s, on Asian-Americans during the Los Angeles riots in 1991, and on Muslim, Sikh and other Asian-Americans in the wake of September 11. This history informs, frames, and has allowed for the rise in hate crimes against Asian-Americans, the racist, mysoginist fetishization of Asian-American women, and the classist, racist attacks on Asian-American working people in the current moment. It is time for all of us to protest, resist and and organize against all forms of white supremacy, misogyny, and hate directed at Asian-American and BIPOC communities.

  We mourn the loss of those murdered: Xiaojie Tan, 49; Daoyou Feng, 44; Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33; Paul Andre Michels, 54; Soon Chung Park, 74; Hyun Jung Grant, 51; Suncha Kim, 69; and Yong Ae Yue, 63. Our deepest condolences go to their families, friends, neighbors and community members. We stand with Asian-Americans everywhere who feel unsafe leaving their homes to go for walks or to carry out everyday duties and errands. We acknowledge and hold space for this tremendous loss, and commit to working to fight the white supremacy, misogyny, racism and classism that have marked the attacks in Atlanta and across the country.

  Dr. Ethel Brooks
  Chair and Graduate Program Director
  Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

• 

• I proudly announce the recipients of the 2021-22 Chancellor-Provost’s Awards for Faculty Excellence, which recognize excellence in innovative teaching, cross-disciplinary research, public engagement, and service. The individuals receiving these awards were nominated by their colleagues for their outstanding contributions.

  I present these awards with great pride in our entire Rutgers–New Brunswick faculty, and with admiration and gratitude for the outstanding work performed by all of our faculty members. This academic year has been an ongoing testimony to your strength and resilience as we have worked together to ensure the continuity of our academic excellence in the service of our students, the State of New Jersey, the nation, and the world.

   The Chancellor-Provost Award for Global Impact, awarded to Ethel Brooks, Associate Professor, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Sociology, School of Arts and Sciences

  It is a privilege to honor these distinguished faculty members, who inspire the next generation of citizens and uphold our mission to serve the public good. Thank you for all that you do for Rutgers–New Brunswick.

  
  Sincerely,Francine Conway,
  Ph.D.Chancellor-Provost,
  Rutgers University­–New Brunswick

• 

• We are pleased to announce that WGSS is currently accepting applications to the new BA/MA Track in Feminist Practices for Social Change. Now in its second year, this track is designed for Rutgers students interested in becoming professional leaders in the areas of social justice and human rights in local through international contexts immediately upon graduation.

  Click here for more information

  Are you interested in working in
  Social Justice,
  Activism, and
  Human Rights?

  Apply to the WGSS BA/MA Track in Feminist Practices for Social Change
  We are pleased to announce that WGSS is currently accepting applications to the new BA/MA Track in Feminist Practices for Social Change. Now in its second year, this track is designed for Rutgers students interested in becoming professional leaders in the areas of social justice and human rights in local, national or international contexts immediately upon graduation.

  SAVETIME, SAVE MONEY!
  • Earn both a BA and MA in WGSS within five years
  • No GRE is required to matriculate into the Track.
  • Complete up to three graduate courses at undergraduate tuition rates.
  • Count one additional advanced undergraduate course (400 level and above) toward the MA.

  EXPAND YOUR PORTFOLIO!
  • Study abroad in Europe through one of two opportunities
  • Earn additional graduate certificates and fellowships from disciplines throughout Rutgers–NB

  JOB PLACEMENT!
  • Access professional training/assistance for immediate entrance into the job market

  • Rutgers students who are WGSS majors and are in their sophomore or junior year may apply.
  • WGSS also welcomes applications from transfer students who have officially matriculated into Rutgers.

  THE APPLICATION DEADLINE IS JUNE 1, 2021.
  For more information, please visit:
  womens-studies.rutgers.edu/academics/graduate-program/prospective-students/ba-m-a-students

  Contact information:
  Ileana Nahon, WGSS Assistant Undergraduate Director
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  OR
  Julie Rajan, Director of the WGSS MA Program
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

  Rutgers Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

• 

• Written by John Chadwick | SAS Senior Writer

  Ameena Qobrtay's double major at Rutgers University puts her on the cusp of contemporary thought while laying the foundation for a career as a writer, scholar, or critic.

  A School of Arts and Sciences junior, Qobrtay is majoring in women’s and gender studies, and journalism and media studies. Her work at The Daily Targum shows how those two majors can work together as a singular calling.

  Journalism is my profession, and women’s and gender studies is my passion As features editor at the Targum, Qobrtay sets the tone for the buzzy Inside Beat section, where recent stories have included a rundown on newly elected LGBTQ officials, an analysis of how the Harry Styles Vogue cover challenges gender stereotypes, and a profile of Jill Biden.

  Qobrtay’s own bylined stories, meanwhile, offer an edgy, feminist take on some of the most talked-about stories, from pop culture to politics. She defended the singer Lizzo against fat shaming, criticized actress Bela Thorne for actions on social media that potentially jeopardized sex workers, and suggested that Democrats are being hypocritical for not taking seriously the accusations against Joe Biden by Tara Reade.

  “Women’s and gender studies gives you a framework for looking at the world,” Qobrtay says. “And that definitely shows in my writing.”

  Click here to read the full article