Welcome to Women’s and Gender Studies
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Faculty Highlights
Candice Merritt
Dr. Candice J. Merritt is a Black feminist scholar whose research interests span Black women's literary, artistic, and cultural production, critical theory, and histories of feminist thought.
She is working on her first book manuscript tentatively titled In Search of Our Mothers' Freedom.
Ariana Vigil
Ariana Vigil is the department chair and teaches courses that focus on U.S. Latinx literature and culture. In particular, she examines how gender, race, sexuality, and class are deployed in various national and transnational contexts.
Her recent book, Public Negotiations: Gender and Journalism in Contemporary US Latino/a Literature, examines how the boundaries of the Latina/o public sphere are negotiated through mass media.
Karen Booth
Karen Booth is the director of Sexuality Studies and teaches courses that focus on transnational, global, and majority, "third," world issues and social movements. She is particularly interested in sexual and reproductive rights, health politics, and transnational feminist and queer organizing.
In her recent book, Local Women/ Global Science: Fighting AIDS in Kenya, she demonstrates the ways in which the micropolitics of AIDS control in Nairobi's public clinics are shaped.
Jillian Hinderliter
Jillian Hinderliter is an Assistant Professor in WGST and Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin Fellow in Jewish History and Culture.
Her research and teaching interests include twentieth century American women's and gender history, Jewish Studies, the history of medicine and health care in the United States, public history, and oral history.
Sarah Bloesch
Sarah Bloesch is an Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and very excited to be beginning her first year at UNC.
Sarah has co-edited the first textbook in religious studies that focuses on the methodological contributions of scholars who remain underrepresented in classroom resources, Cultural Approaches to Studying Religion: An Introduction to Theories and Methods
Tanya Shields
Tanya Shields is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Women's and Gender Studies.
In Bodies and Bones, Tanya Shields argues that a repeated engagement with the Caribbean's iconic and historic touchstones offers a new sense of inter/national belonging that brings an alternative and dynamic vision to the gendered legacy of brutality against black bodies, flesh, and bone.
News
NC Humanities Awards $20,000 to WGST
The grant is part of supporting local history and storytelling projects
WGST Fall 2024 Newsletter
The Fall 2024 Newsletter is here!
Upcoming Events
A History of Women’s & Gender Studies
SPRING 1872
Sallie Walker Stockard becomes the first woman to graduate from UNC.
SUMMER 1877
Women begin enrolling in UNC for summer classes.
1896
Half a dozen women enrolled at UNC in the undergraduate program.
1941
Susan Grey Akers becomes dean of the UNC School of Library Science.
1951
Gwendolyn Harrison becomes the first African-American woman to attend UNC.
1965
Karen Parker becomes the first female African-American graduate from UNC, receiving a degree in Journalism.
MARCH 3RD, 1970
The student group Female Liberation issues a list of demands I one of which calls for “inclusion of courses for and about women in the curriculum.”
SPRING 1972
Margaret Anne O’Connor teaches the first course on Women in Literature.
FEBRUARY 27TH, 1973
The University Women for Affirmative Action organizes with the goal of ending iscrimination based on gender at UNC.
1974
An ad hoc committee is established for the Women’s Studies Program.
APRIL 1975
The Chancellor’s committee approves of the creation of a Women’s Studies Program.
JULY 2ND, 1976
Mary Turner Lane agrees to serve as the first Director of the Women’s Studies Program.
SPRING 1977
The Women’s Studies curriculum begins offering courses. Women’s Studies is offered as an area of concentration under the Interdisciplinary Studies major.
1978
Joan Scott and Mary Turner Lane develop the first Women’s Studies Course, Women’s Studies 50, an “Introduction to Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Gender.” Scott was the first to teach a Women’s Stuc:lies Class at UNC.
SUMMER 1978
The Association for Women’s Faculty is formed to “promote intellectual and social contact among women faculty members.”
1979
Sandra Jo Martin from Elkin, NC, is the first graduate in the Women’s Studies Major. Martin was the editor of She and an intern with the Council on the Status of Women.”
1981
Jane De-Hart Mathews is chosen as Turner’s successor and becomes full-time director of the Women’s Studies Program.
1982
The Duke-UNC Center for Research on Women is established with a 225K grant from the Ford Foundation to promote Women’s Studies scholarship, research, and curriculum development in the South.
1988
The Women’s Studies program offers a certificate in Women’s Studies. Many students used this certificate similarly to a minor in other fields in order to include Women’s Studies on their transcript without majoring in the program.
1989-1990
Graduate students at UNC organized the first women’s studies graduate conference called “Women’s Studies in the Triangle.”
JULY 31, 1992
The UNC System Board of Governors approved the independent Bachelor of Arts in Women’s Studies as a full-fledged curriculum (a B.A. degree in Women’s Studies). Students could now major in Women’s Studies.
1994
A graduate minor in Women’s Studies established.
MARCH 4TH, 1996
The Women’s Studies department celebrated its 20th anniversary.
2004
The Women’s Studies program begins offering a minor in Sexuality Studies.
JULY 1ST, 2012
The Department of Women’s Studies becomes the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.
2022
The Department of Women’s and Gender Studies has 9 full-time faculty members and has graduated 402 majors and minors!
