Overview

What are the career and graduate school options for Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies majors from The College of Wooster?

Graduates of the WGSS program go in many directions after Wooster. Some have attended graduate school in women’s and gender studies, others have pursued graduate degrees in social work, library science, English, sociology, psychology, nurse-midwifery, and divinity. Their careers include working with NGOs for women’s rights, counseling in rape crisis centers, coordinating sex education programs for Planned Parenthood, teaching from pre-school through College. Whatever their chosen field, alums report the profound impact that their major/minor in WGSS has had on their view of the world, affecting everything from becoming politically active to the paid work they engage in to making choices about creating families and raising children.

Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at The College of Wooster

The WGSS curriculum is based in feminist scholarship-both within traditional disciplines across the academic divisions and in response to questions that cannot be answered within the framework of a single discipline. To foster this interdisciplinary inquiry, the Women’s Studies Program was established in 1978 and has been built upon the feminist teaching, scholarship, and activism of faculty and students with a wide variety of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives. In the past few decades, the program has grown and evolved, changing its name to the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program in 2008 to recognize important changes within feminist scholarship.

Acknowledging this important history, WGSS courses retain Women’s Studies’ focus on examining previously unavailable information about the lives and contributions of women and analyzing the effects of cultural attitudes, power and inequality, and social structures on the experiences of women as they intersect with race, nation, ability, class, religion, and other axes of difference. In addition, feminist scholarship has recognized and explored commonalities between women’s oppression and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other sexual minorities worldwide, as well as the varied experiences of masculinity throughout the globe. In this vein, WGSS courses explore the cultural construction of sex, gender, and sexuality in the context of their relationship between theoretical and experiential knowledge and privileging historically marginalized voices. WGSS encourages scholarship and teaching that is committed to the feminist principle of creating a more just world for all.

Faculty & Staff

Ahmet Atay

Professor of Communication Studies; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Program Chair of Global Media & Digital Studies; Liaison to Digital Visual Storytelling Pathway

aatay@wooster.edu

Christa Craven

Interim Dean for Faculty Development, Professor of Anthropology and Department Chair of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies

ccraven@wooster.edu

Katherine Holt

Associate Professor of History; Latin American Studies Department Chair; Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies Co-Chair; Global and International Studies; Co-Liaison to Digital and Visual Storytelling Pathway

kholt@wooster.edu

Sina Lee

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

silee@wooster.edu

Beth Muellner

Professor and Department Chair of German Studies and Russian Studies; Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies Co-Chair; Global and International Studies (On leave for AY 2023-24)

bmuellner@wooster.edu

Santha Schuch

Administrative Coordinator - Africana Studies, Archaeology, East Asian Studies, Middle Eastern & North African Studies, Religious Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, South Asian Studies, Urban Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

sschuch@wooster.edu

Naoko Skala

Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (One leave for Spring 2024)

nskala@wooster.edu

Zareen Thomas

Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology; Latin American Studies; Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

zthomas@wooster.edu

Ziying You

Associate Professor & Department Chair of Chinese Studies; East Asian Studies; Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

zyou@wooster.edu

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