News & Events
- Event Start Date: January 25, 2018
- Event Start Time: 4:30 PM
- Event Location: Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building, Conference Room 101 162 Ryders Lane, New Brunswick, NJ
Join Professor Deborah Vargas for a lecture exploring the sonic and affective dimensions of racialized gender and sexuality through music. This talk engages the cultural politics of “Brown Pride” and “Black Love” as they resonate across musical forms and social movements.
🔗 Faculty bio
Presented by: Rutgers Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair In Media, Culture and Feminist Studies
The Gloria Steinem Chair honors and draws to campus eminent scholars and practitioners to immerse the university community in debate and scholarship about new media, social change, and power structures.
Occupants of the chair design and teach courses, providing unique opportunities to connect students with media experts who focus on gender equality and creating a more inclusive and democratic media. The Steinem Chair was launched in 2018 with Naomi Klein serving as the inaugural occupant.
The Gloria Steinem Chair is an innovative collaboration among the Rutgers Institute for Women's Leadership, School of Communication and Information and the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the School of Arts and Sciences.
Roxane Gay
Dr. Roxane Gay, an internationally recognized writer, editor, cultural critic, and educator, is the 2022-2025 Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Gay’s pursuit of social justice makes her appointment especially powerful as she brings a commitment to centering underrepresented voices along with deep and broad experience in media.
"I am truly honored to serve as the new Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers," Gay said. "I walk and work in the footsteps of the many feminists and womanists who came before me, and Gloria is one of the giants among those women. I look forward to joining and contributing to a vibrant intellectual community both on and beyond campus."
Her tenure began in September 2022 in a wide-ranging conversation with feminist icon Gloria Steinem, moderated by feminist activist and writer Jamia Wilson. In her first year, Gay not only taught two undergraduate courses exploring cultural criticism, trauma, Black feminisms, and intersections of identity, but also provided mentorship to aspiring student authors through creative writing cohorts. In addition, Gay has held events that offered a variety of writing opportunities for faculty and emerging writers in the community as well as brought best-selling authors, like Chloé Cooper Jones, to campus. To see more of her events, click here.
Roxane Gay's writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney's, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women, and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity and a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.
She holds a doctorate degree in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Technological University and has years of experience teaching creative, professional, and technical writing at institutions of higher education.
To learn more about the history of the Gloria Steinem Chair, click here.
(Gay) Panic Attack: Lecture with David Eng
- Event Start Date: October 12, 2023
- Event Start Time: 2:30 PM
- Event Location: Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building, 162 Ryders Lane, New Brunswick, NJ
Join David Eng for a lecture drawn from his co-authored book with Shinhee Han, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia and Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans. The talk explores the psychic dimensions of racial identity, melancholia, and dissociation among Asian American young adults, with attention to gender and sexuality.
Presented by:
- The Henry Rutgers Chair in Comparative Sexuality, Gender, and Race
- The Graduate Program in Women’s and Gender Studies
📧 For seminar details, contact:
REGISTRATION REQUIRED:
Roshni Rides team wins $1 Million Hult Prize
Fueled by a passion to make a difference in the lives of refugees in South Asia, the team embarked on a marathon quest to build a transportation business from scratch.
A team representing Rutgers Business School won the $1 million Hult Prize for social entrepreneurship on Sept. 16, capping off 11 months of entrepreneurial effort with a polished, convincing pitch about the ability of its rickshaw transportation business to improve the lives of refugees overseas.
Student Gia Farooqi, new graduates Hasan Usmani and Moneeb Mian, and alumna Hanaa Lakhani created the Roshni Rides startup as a way of answering the 2017 Hult Prize Challenge of developing a business capable of restoring the dignity of one million refugees by 2022. The company uses a pre-loaded transaction card, encourages ride-sharing and employes existing rickshaw drivers.
The Paris 8 Exchange Lecture Series 2017
- Event Start Date: September 20, 2017
- Event Start Time: 4:30 PM
- Event Location: Rutgers University
As part of the Rutgers–Paris VIII exchange program, feminist theorist Anne Emmanuelle Berger delivered a series of thought-provoking lectures exploring psychoanalysis, translation, and poetic theory through a gendered lens.
📅 Lecture Schedule:
- Sept 20, 4:30 PM – Is Psychoanalysis a Theory of Gender? Location: Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building (DRC), Conference Room Hosted by: Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
- Oct 4, 4:30 PM – Irigaray’s Breath: Poetry after Poets Location: Academic Building, Seminar Room 4052 Hosted by: French Department
- Oct 12, 4:30 PM – Gender Studies Today and the Resistance to Translation Location: Academic Building, Seminar Room 4052 Hosted by: Program in Comparative Literature
- Oct 26, 12:00 PM – Lunchtime Talk: Research on the Muddling of Gender Location: Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building (DRC), Conference Room Hosted by: Institute for Research on Women
WGS Summer 2016 Courses
Check out these great course offerings from WGS in Summer Session 2016!
Summer Session I
What are the politics of sex? race? gender?
Introduction to Gender, Race, and Sexuality 988: 101: B2 Instructor Arev Pivazyan
SUMMER SESSION I: MAY 31–JULY 8. MON/WEDS. This course counts towards the Core Curriculum requirements.
This course will explore some of the following questions
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What do race and gender have to do with each other?
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How is sex politicized?
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#blacklivesmatter #idlenomore – how is racism built into government?
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Identities: how do we talk about them and what do they do?
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What rights do we have to our bodies? Sex? Clothes? Surgery?
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What is a normal body?
Drawing on the work of contemporary artists of color such as Kehinde Wiley, Adrian Piper, and Wangechi Mutu, we’ll talk about the visual politics of race and gender in relation to things like hair, skin color, masculinity, hip hop, technology, and sexuality. Requirements for the course include readings and twice weekly postings via eCollege, along with a short final paper. The course satisfies the elective requirement for any WGS major or minor.
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New Faculty Publications
Check out some of the recent publications from WGS faculty!
We are pleased to announce several new faculty publications in the field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, showcasing rigorous scholarship and critical engagement with questions of power, inequality, and social justice. Recent titles include Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, Gender and Power: Toward Equality and Democratic Governance, and Embodied Power: Demystifying Disembodied Politics. Together, these works reflect the depth, interdisciplinary reach, and scholarly impact of our faculty’s ongoing contributions to feminist and gender studies.
Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, Marisa J. Fuentes, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
In the eighteenth century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Fuentes takes us through the streets of Bridgetown with an enslaved runaway; inside a brothel run by a freed woman of color; in the midst of a white urban household in sexual chaos; to the gallows where enslaved people were executed; and within violent scenes of enslaved women's punishments. In the process, Fuentes interrogates the archive and its historical production to expose the ongoing effects of white colonial power that constrain what can be known about these women.
Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women's bodies, in life and in death. By vividly recounting enslaved life through the experiences of individual women and illuminating their conditions of confinement through the legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, colonial authorities, and the archive, Fuentes challenges the way we write histories of vulnerable and often invisible subjects.
The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, Edited by Mary Hawkesworth and Lisa Disch
The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (2016) provides an overview of analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts feminist theorists have developed to explicate the known world. Featuring leading feminist theorists from diverse regions of the globe, the collection provides in-depth explorations of fifty subject areas, demonstrating the complexity of feminist challenges to established knowledge, while also engaging areas of contestation within feminist theory. Capturing a plurality of approaches across a diverse array of topics and disciplines, the Handbook raises new questions, brings new evidence, and poses significant challenges to academic disciplines spanning the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of feminist theory, the chapters offer innovative analyses of topics central to social and political science (e.g., civilization, development, divisions of labor, economies, institutions, markets, migration, militarization, prisons, policy, politics, representation, state/nation, the transnational, violence), cultural studies and humanities (e.g., affect, agency, experience, identities, intersectionality, jurisprudence, narrative, performativity, popular culture, posthumanism, religion, representation, standpoint, temporality, visual culture), discourses associated with medicine and science (e.g., cyborgs, health, intersexuality, nature, pregnancy, reproduction, science studies, sex/gender, sexuality, transsexuality), and issues in contemporary critical theory that have been transformed through feminist theorization (e.g., biopolitics, coloniality, diaspora, microphysics of power, norms/normalization, postcoloniality, race/racialization, subjectivity/subjectivation). The Handbook identifies limitations of key epistemic assumptions that inform traditional scholarship and shows how theorizing from women’s and men’s lives has profound effects on the conceptualization of central categories, whether the field of analysis is aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, development, economics, film studies, health, history, literature, politics, religion, science studies, sexualities, violence, or war.
Gender and Power: Toward Equality and Democratic Governance, Mino Vianello and Mary Hawkesworth (Palgrave Macmillian, 2015)
Offering sophisticated insights into inequalities in opportunities, roles, power, and rights in societies across the globe, this volume investigates factors that enable and constrain women's advancement. From intimate relations, social norms, ideologies, and structures of power to political institutions, electoral systems, and public policies, the chapters analyze possibilities for and obstacles to inclusive democratic practices and identify interventions essential to democratic governance.
Embodied Power: Demystifying Disembodied Politics, Mary Hawkesworth (Routledge, 2016)
Embodied Power (2016) explores dimensions of politics seldom addressed in political science, illuminating state practices that produce hierarchically-organized groups through racialized gendering—despite guarantees of formal equality. Challenging disembodied accounts of citizenship, the book traces how modern science and law produce race, gender, and sexuality as purportedly natural characteristics, masking their political genesis. Taking the United States as a case study, Hawkesworth demonstrates how diverse laws and policies concerning civil and political rights, education, housing, and welfare, immigration and securitization, policing and criminal justice create finely honed hierarchies of difference that structure the life prospects of men and women of particular races and ethnicities within and across borders. In addition to documenting the continuing operation of embodied power across diverse policy terrains, the book investigates complex ways of seeing that render raced-gendered relations of domination and subordination invisible. From common assumptions about individualism and colorblind perception to disciplinary norms such as methodological individualism, methodological nationalism, and abstract universalism, problematic presuppositions sustain mistaken notions concerning formal equality and legal neutrality that allow state practices of racialized gendering to escape detection with profound consequences for the life prospects of privileged and marginalized groups. Through sustained critique of these flawed suppositions, Embodied Power challenges central beliefs about the nature of power, the scope of state action, and the practice of liberal democracy and identifies alternative theoretical frameworks that make racialized-gendering visible and actionable.
Spring 2016 WGS Highlights
WGS has a whole lot to celebrate in Spring 2016!
Join us in congratulating department faculty, staff, and students on a range of awards, prizes, and accomplishments over the past year!
- PhD Candidate Rosemary Ndubuizu was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, which will award her a year's worth of funding to finish her dissertation!
- Professor Carlos Decena was selected by the Rutgers University Committee to Advance our Common Purposes (CACP) to receive a Leaders in Faculty Diversity Award for 2016! Professor Decena is being honored for his work in advancing the boundaries of interdisciplinary scholarship and research in Ethnic, Queer, and Spiritual Studies; for his leadership in Latino Studies at the national level; and for his international collaborations as a Fulbright specialist in Women's Studies at the Centro Latino-Americano de Economía Humana and between the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Institute for Research on Women (IRW), Rutgers University.
- Professor Mary Hawkesworth and WGS Administrative Staff Monique Gregory and Suzy Kiefer were the recipients of this year's Ernest McMahon Class of 1930 Award. This award is given for work which extends the mission of the university to the state of NJ. Mary, Monique, and Suzy were awarded the prize for their exemplary work in establishing and promoting our National Nurses United Certificate Program in Women's Global Health Leadership.
- Professor Nikol Alexander-Floyd received the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) Presidential Award and was awarded a 2015 Hight Summer Writing Fellowship in Orlando, Florida.
- Professor Ethel Brooks received a US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair. She will be affiliated with TrAIN, the TransnationalCenter for Art, Identity and Nation, and CCW, the Chelsea-Camberwell-Wimbledon Graduate School. She also received a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Networking Grant and will serve as Co-Investigator in the project “Performing Romani Identities as Strategy and Critique,” with Jane Collins, University of the Arts London.
- WGS Department Chair and Professor Abena Busia was awarded, with Professor Ousseina D. Alidou, a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship for collaborative research, training, and co-curricular development and other capacity building projects at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria.
- Professor Radhika Balakrishnan was awarded grants from the Ford Foundation and an anonymous foundation for the continued work of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership. She was also awarded a Palestinian American Research Council fellowship to go to Jerusalem and the West Bank as a part of a scholar exchange with Palestinian academics in May 2015, and she was selected to serve a two‐year term as a Commissioner for Gender Equity by Mayor de Blasio for the City of New York, June 2015 ‐ June 2017. Finally, Professor Balakrishnan was appointed Co-Chair of the Civil Society Advisory Committee for the United Nations Development Program.
- Professor Alison Bernstein was elected Life Trustee of the Samuel Rubin Foundation.
- Professor Charlotte Bunch received the CUNY (City University of New York) School of Law Dean’s Award, March 11, 2015.
- Professor Susan J. Carroll is serving as Co-principal Investigator in the project “Women Representing in an Era of Polarization,” which was funded by a grant to the Center for American Women and Politics from the Hunt Alternatives Fund in the amount of $400,000 for the period of 2015-17. She also received a Lifetime Contribution to Political Studies Award from the Political Studies Association (United Kingdom) in 2014.
- Professor Sylvia Chan-Malik was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities/Scholar in Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
- Professor Brittney Cooper was awarded the Darwin T. Turner prize for best published article on African American Literature in 2014 in the African American Review. She was also awarded the National Organization of Women's Olga Vives Award for "extraordinary accomplishments as co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective, educator, and advocate for women and men of color." This award will be conferred in June.
- Women's Studies Librarian Kayo Denda is the 2016 winner of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Women and Gender Studies Section (WGSS) Career Achievement Award. The award honors significant long-standing contributions to womens studies in the field of librarianship over the course of a career.
- Professor Judith Gerson was invited to be the (U.S.) Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for the 2017 - 2018 academic year.
- Professor Julie Rajan, Visiting Scholar, GEMMA Erasmus Mundus Program, 2016, will be visiting Italy and Poland to study the rise of Islamaphobia in these spaces in accordance with her work on the Islamic State.
- Professor Joanna Regulska received one of Poland's highest merit awards, the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, for contributions to building local democracy and civic society after 1989 in Poland, advancing the place of women in politics, and strengthening international cooperation, through both research and service.
- The 2016 Northeast Assosication of Graduate School Awards recognized two WGS faculty in 2016: Brittney Cooper won their Award for Master's level teaching and Jasbir Puar won their Award for Doctoral level teaching.
- The Graduate School of New Brunswick awarded Carlos Decena their Teaching Award and Monique Gregory their Staff Excellence Award!
Please join us in congratulating the WGS community on these amazing accomplishments!
Spring 2016 Events: Save the Date
Monday, February 15, 2016 // Convivial Conversation (11am - 1pm)
Join us in our first Convivial Conversation of the Spring 2016 Semester with PhD candidate Jenna Brager in conversation with Professor Judith Gerson
The Selfie and the Other: Reading Viral Images and Media Panics in Europe's Refugee Crisis
RSVP to Suzy Kiefer (
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) and on Facebook!
Wednesday, March 30 // Demystifying Academia Workshop (11am - 1pm)
Join Marisa Allison and Gwendolyn Beethman in a workshop on Women's and Gender Studies: Between Exploitation and Resistance
RSVP to Suzy Kiefer (
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) and on Facebook!
Obama Appoints WGS Professor Ethel Brooks to U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council
Menendez Congratulates Rutgers Professor on Prestigious Holocaust Memorial Appointment
Monday, January 11, 2016
WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) today congratulated Metuchen, New Jersey resident and Rutgers University professor Dr. Ethel Brooks on her appointment to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. Menendez recommended Dr. Brooks for this appointment in the 113th Congress.
“I am pleased Dr. Brooks will be joining the esteemed Holocaust Memorial Council to help educate society so we never again allow the atrocities of the past to be repeated,” said Sen. Menendez. “Dr. Books is an intelligent, principled educator who will help ensure the Holocaust Museum continues to teach vital lessons about the abhorrence of ethnic and racial intolerance. As the numbers of Holocaust survivors dwindle, the museum’s mission that we never forget becomes all the more important.”
About Dr. Brooks
Dr. Ethel Brooks is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University, where she has held various positions since 2001. She has been a Tate-TrAIN Transnational Fellow at the University of the Arts London since 2012, where she was also US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair from 2011 to 2012. Dr. Brooks serves as a member of numerous boards and commissions, including the USC Shoah Foundation, the European Roma Rights Centre, and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. She also served as a Public Member of the United States Delegation to the Human Dimension Implementation meetings of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and is a member of the United States Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and its Roma Genocide Working Group.
About the Council
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council was established by Congress in 1980 to commemorate the Holocaust and raise private funds for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Council consists of 55 members appointed by the president, as well as five members each from the Senate and House of Representatives and three ex-officio members from the Departments of Education, Interior, and State.
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