Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) is an interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that places gender, and its intersection with sexuality, at the center of inquiry. It raises many questions about gender and sexuality as socially and culturally constructed phenomena that affect our personal lives, artistic expression, social relationships, and the ways we think about ourselves and the world.
Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies considers the ways gender and sexuality and other social categories such as class, race, ethnicity, nationality, dis/ability, and age shape our experiences. Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies is one of the fastest growing fields of inquiry to emerge in higher education in the past forty years.
For over forty years, WGSS at Ohio State has developed into an outstanding academic unit and intellectual hub, with a long history of building the field of WGSS locally, nationally, and internationally. Our faculty is conducting cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research in an important range of fields and we consistently engage communities beyond campus. Our faculty have received awards and fellowships from Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Fulbright Scholar Program, Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Harvard University, and National Women's Studies Association. They have received recognition within The College of Arts and Sciences and at Ohio State for their excellence in teaching, service, and research. These awards include the Harlan Hatcher Distinguished Faculty Award, the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award, Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching, the Humanities and Arts Discovery Theme Research Grants.
Currently, the department is comprised of 11 core faculty, and more than 56 affiliated graduate faculty across 21 departments. We average approximately 80 undergraduate majors, 150 minors, and 30 graduate students.
The department offers an undergraduate major and minor, M.A., Ph.D., and a graduate minor. Our students find a supportive, intellectually challenging community, small class sizes, and close interaction with faculty. Our exceptional graduate students have received awards such as the Graduate School's Presidential Fellowship, the Distinguished University Fellowship, Graduate Enrichment Fellowship, the Graduate Associate Teaching Award, as well as external awards such as the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship.
Our curriculum and individual courses are designed to engage students as active, critical thinkers who can create new knowledge about the vast array of contemporary problems facing us as global citizens. At a time when cultures are increasingly polarized along ideological lines, WGSS educates students, at all levels, to think in nuanced manners about the production of systems of inequality and injustice. Trained in interdisciplinary methodologies, WGSS students learn how to analyze power in all its rich complexity, locally and globally.