Warm greetings to all of you!
I am so happy to send you this fresh news from the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies! Many, many exciting developments, moves, hires, expansions and achievements are happening here in the feminist nook of Ohio State’s campus. With unforeseen support and the incredible boost of undergraduate enrollments, WGSS is flying higher than ever before!
As you’ll find in these pages, we are expanding in all areas of the department! Since 2021, we have hired five new tenure-track faculty, with a sixth hire currently pending, and welcomed a colleague back to the Columbus campus. These new scholars are working across an astonishing array of fields: feminist economics, especially in development and migration; photography, collage, sculpture, and video production; educational policy and Black girls’ experiences in schools and society; reproductive justice, Palestine, and settler colonialism; trans* memoir and lifewriting, especially in trans* of color authors; Indigenous feminisms; and feminist film-making. We are brimming over with excitement and energy with this wonderful influx of new scholar-teachers! We were also thrilled to see three faculty promoted to Professor in 2022: hearty congratulations to Professors Treva Lindsey, Wendy Smooth and Mytheli Sreenivas!
We are also expanding rapidly at the undergraduate level of enrollments, largely driven by the university’s adoption of a new required course for all Ohio State students in “Race, Ethnicity and Gender.” The WGSS department is spearheading this new requirement and teaching 25% of all offerings across the campus. Consequently, the undergraduate demand for WGSS courses is at an all-time high! To keep up with this demand, we have welcomed several alumni back to teach with us as lecturers, in addition to a couple who were already doing so and a couple of fabulous feminists who happen not to be our alums. We love having these folks teach with us regularly: Julia Applegate (Ohio State WGSS MA), Sierra Austin-King (Ohio State WGSS PhD), Dorian Rhea Debussy, Kate Livingston (Ohio State WGSS PhD), Madeleine McClung (Ohio State WGSS MA), Nicole Nieto (Ohio State WGSS PhD), Tatsiana Shchurko (Ohio State WGSS PhD), Sujatha Subramanian (Ohio State WGSS PhD) and Desiree Tims.
As you’ll find in these pages, our graduate and undergraduate students all continue to do remarkable things, landing positions at campuses, centers, non-profits, museums, government agencies and corporations across the nation. Please consider welcoming WGSS alumni in your local city or community! (Reach out to the amazing Jackson Stotlar if this is of interest.)
The words “community engagement” have come to define our work in WGSS. Faculty are running an astonishing range of collaborative research projects: a local community murals project in the Linden neighborhood of Columbus; The Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project that is administering several Ohio State courses inside local prisons each semester; an online certificate in Sexual and Gender Minority (LGBTQ+) Healthcare grounded in our feminist scholarship; the Beyond Guilt exhibition in Cincinnati and Columbus; and so much more. We are regularly moving our scholarship into communities and, again, invite you to join us in these local, on-the-ground activities.
Finally, to keep this kinetic, expanding network moving, we have also expanded our fabulous staff to include Rebekah Sims, Benjamin Skowrons, Jackson Stotlar and Amber Williams. The Ohio State bureaucracy is one mean machine and we rely upon and are grateful to these wonderful colleagues each and every day. They also generate some of our best ideas and initiatives!
Feminist research and pedagogy are alive and well in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State! We always love to hear from you, so please feel free to drop us an email with updates on your own fabulous activities. If it makes sense for you to support us fiscally, here’s that link: go.osu.edu/givetoWGSS.
However and wherever you are living your feminist lives, please always know that we are flourishing in Columbus and welcome you whenever you return to campus.
Yours in feminist solidarity and joy,
Shannon Winnubst
Chair
