GENDER, WOMEN & SEXUALITY STUDIES FACT SHEET

• Established in 1970 as Women Studies, the department changed its name to Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies (GWSS) in 2011; in 2025 we celebrated our 55th Anniversary.
• Four GWSS faculty members have won the prestigious UW Distinguished Teaching Award; one has won the UW Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award; and another was named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar.
• Our graduate program in Feminist Studies, established in 1998, was on of the first of its kind and remains highly regarded among the 25 current U.S. doctoral programs in the field of GWSS.
• The department graduated its first two PhD students in 2006, and has granted a total of 40 PhD and 15 MA degrees as of Autumn 2024.
• Five of our students (four graduate and one undergraduate) have received the College of Arts & Sciences Dean's Medal, in recognition of their exemplary scholarship and commitment to social justice.
• A GWSS PhD alum has been awarded both a 2013 Grammy, for best Latin Rock, Urban or Alternative album, and a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship/"Genius Grant."
• In 2024, the department received an Affirming Multivocal Humanities grant from the Mellon Foundation that has seed funded initiatives including an undergraduate research grant program and annual community gathering.

The Department offers BA and PhD degrees, as well as an Undergraduate Minor and Graduate Certificates in Feminist Studies and Sexuality & Queer Studies.

Our undergraduate major trains students to analyze how gender and sexuality shape personal experiences and interlocking systems of power. By examining how gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, legal status and ability, students cultivate a deeper understanding of individual, social and political inequalities as well as movements for change. They ask urgent, critical questions and break down conventional academic assumptions, developing innovative methods for examining and addressing current issues in diverse local and global contexts. They apply their findings and gain real-world experience through a required capstone project and optional internship. Through our newly developed GWSS Practices Lab, students can build their skill portfolio in areas such as arts and creative practice, exhibit curation, archive development, digital media production, community engagement, algorithmic justice, and feminist and queer health and medical justice. 

The graduate program prepares students for scholarly careers in feminist research and teaching in interdisciplinary gender, women, and sexuality studies and/or related disciplines at the university/college level. Our doctoral students represent the next generation of scholars trained in intersectional, decolonial, indigenous, queer, and transnational feminisms as forms of thought and praxis key to building more just societies.

Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies alumni are adept collaborators who have experience working in settings with diverse perspectives and critical agility in creatively addressing the world’s persistent and urgent problems. They use these skills in a variety of fields, including business, creative arts and humanities, museum curation, education, government, health care, law, media and communication, nonprofit administration, psychology, public policy, and technology. Graduates of our doctoral program have taken tenure-track positions at major universities and liberal arts colleges, postdoctoral fellowships, research positions, directorships of Women’s Centers, and leadership positions in international organizations. They also have a strong presence working in cultural institutions, governmental agencies, and nonprofit organizations.

Students

Autumn 2024

• 80 Undergraduate majors
• 65 Undergraduate minors
• 13 Doctoral students
• 13 Graduate Certificate students

Degrees Awarded

 July 2023 - June 2024

• 22 Bachelor of Arts degrees
• 3 PhD degrees
• 3 Graduate Certificates

Major Student Awards

2022-2024

• 1 American Association of University Women (AAUW) Dissertation Fellowship
• 3 Chester Fritz International Research & Study Fellowships
• 1 College of Arts & Sciences Alvord Fellowship
• 1 College of Arts & Sciences Dean’s Medal
• 1 College of Arts & Sciences Humanities Scholarship
• 1 Duke SEAREG Pre-Dissertation Fellowship
• 1 Graduate School Distinguished Thesis Award
• 3 Graduate School Presidential Dissertation Fellowships
• 2 Graduate School Top Scholar Awards
• 1 Herman S. and Dorothy B. Lederman Endowed Scholarship
• 1 Husky 100 Award
• 1 Institute for Citizens & Scholars Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship
• 1 Mary Katherine Mackenzie and Mary Ann Whitmore Endowed Scholarship
• 3 Nancy C.M. Hartsock Prizes for Best Graduate Paper in Feminist Studies
• 1 National LGBTQ Task Force Creating Change Immigration Award
• 1 Simpson Center Society of Scholars (Graduate Student) Fellowship
• 2 UW Center for Human Rights Awards
• 1 UW Libraries Research Communication & Equity Fellow

AWARDED BY GWSS

• 3 GWSS Service Awards 
• 5 Herring Phelps Scholarly Activism Awards 
• 4 Herring Phelps Outstanding GWSS Senior Awards 
• 4 Marie Doman Excellence in Teaching Awards 
• 6 Pamela E. Yee Gender and Disability Studies Awards
• 7 Mellon Undergraduate Research Grants

Autumn 2024

• 4 Professors
• 3 Associate Professors
• 1 Assistant Professor
• 1 Teaching Professor
• 4 Part-time Lecturers
• 5 Professors Emerita
• 49 Adjunct Faculty
• 10 Affiliate Faculty

Faculty Awards & Honors

2022-2024

• 1 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant
• 1 Bonnie & Vern L. Bullough Book Award (Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality)
• 1 Center for Teaching & Learning Evidence-Based Teaching Fellowship
• 1 Distinguished Teaching Award (UW)
• 1 Diverse Sexualities Research and Education Institute (DSREI) Professional Book Award
• 1 Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar
• 1 Marsha Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award (UW)
• 1 NWSA Gloria Anzaldúa Book Award
• 1 Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Pilot Grant via Decolonizing Art Institute, University of the Arts, London
• 1 Royalty Research Fund (RRF) Award
• 1 Ruth Foundation for the Arts Future Studies Grant
• 1 Simpson Center Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship
• 1 UW Population Health Initiative Tier 1 Pilot Grant

Our department has been at the cutting edge of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies since its establishment as an academic field. The scholarship and pedagogy of our faculty have consistently advanced critical analysis of gender and sexuality — in relation to race, class, and disability, in debates about U.S. Women of Color and transnational feminisms, and in terms of queer and trans studies.

GWSS at UW has long been reputed for scholarly expertise in women of color and transnational feminisms. While the department once distinguished itself among others in the U.S. through its social science orientation, we are now thoroughly interdisciplinary, with faculty whose scholarship is in dialogue with anthropology, art history, critical race studies, data studies, geography, history, labor studies, literature, media studies, medical humanities, music, performance studies, political science, urban studies, and science and technology studies, as well as Indigenous studies; Black and Africana studies; Chicanx, Latinx, and Latin American studies; and East Asian, South Asian, and Asian American studies.

Our research innovates and enlivens academic and public debates using books, articles, archive development, exhibit curation, digital media production, poetry, performance, and community engagement. Our histories of innovative public engagement are both wide and rich. Faculty have collaborated, for example, with the local Frye Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle Art Museum (SAM), Seattle Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) and Museum of Popular Culture (MoPOP), as well as the national Smithsonian Institution and international organizations such as Gender Dynamix (South Africa), Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hyderabad Urban Lab (India), KRIA (The Icelandic Constitution Archives), and Oxford Internet Institute (England).

Social justice concerns have been central to our mission from the beginning. As individual scholars and as a department, our research is dedicated to the analysis of historical and contemporary intersectional feminist praxis in the realms of feminist technologies and creative practice; gender equality, queer, and trans rights; Indigenous, immigrant, labor, and environmental rights; prison abolition, Black Lives Matter, and anti-war movements; and other on- and offline mobilizations that advance justice-minded paradigms across the Global South and North and imagine new worlds.

Areas of Research

• African/Africana Studies
• Art History
• Asian/Asian American Studies
• Black Feminist Thought
• Black Studies
• Chicanx/Latinx Feminisms
• Critical Feminist Data Studies
• Critical Pedagogy
• Critical Race Studies
• Decolonial & Postcolonial Politics
• Digital Humanities
• Ethnography
• Feminist Political Economy and Commodity Chain Studies
• Feminist Studies in Science, Technology, and Medicine
• Feminist Theory and Methods
• Gender and History
• Gender, Fandom, and Speculative Fiction
• Globalization, Migration and Transnational Feminisms
• Indigenous Studies
• Intersex Studies
• Labor Studies
• Museology and Archive Studies
• Oral History
• Performance Studies
• Poetry and Poetics
• Popular Music
• Public Scholarship
• Queer Studies
• Reproduction/Social Reproduction
• Rural-Urban Informal Economies
• Sexuality and Queer Studies
• Transgender Studies
• Urban Studies
• Women and Violence
• Visual Culture

Always responsive to community needs that create connections on and off campus, our department has developed public-facing programs such as Native Voices Indigenous Media, Womxn Who Rock, New Geographies of Feminist Art, The Black Embodiments Studio, and Abolitionist Futures & Intentional Kin-Making. GWSS also organizes an annual public lecture and campus visit by an invited Stice Feminist Scholar of Feminist Justice; an annual lecture in Sexuality & Queer Studies; and an annual spring community gathering that brings faculty, alumni, students, and community members into conversation around critical issues.

GWSS undergraduate majors work with a wide range of local organizations, companies, and government agencies through internships, sometimes forged through alumni relations.

Our quarterly departmental newsletter and email invitations to key lectures and events give visibility to the work and achievements of our students, alumni, and faculty, as we continue to build a robust academic and activist network in the region and beyond.

Our Advancement and Communications Committee integrates community-building efforts with future development goals: to generate more sustainable and competitive graduate student funding; to support a more robust sexuality and queer studies program; to continue our new undergraduate research grant program; and to build out a GWSS Practices Lab through which students can skill-build toward future careers.

Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
Box 354345
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
(206) 543-6900
gwss.washington.edu

last update: December 2024