Overview

Welcome USM Students, Faculty, and Friends,

Women and Gender Studies (WGS) at USM is the longest standing feminist studies program in northern New England and continues to be one of the most vibrant.  With a faculty drawn from across the university, WGS engages in transformative teaching, scholarship, and social change on campus and in the surrounding community. WGS not only contributes many courses to the university’s general education curriculum, it also offers a socially-engaged and academically rigorous major and minor.  This semester, WGS faculty are teaching such courses as Arab Women Writers; Gender, Race, Class and the City; and Species, Sex, Gender and Science Fiction.  In addition,WGS students are completing capstone experience internships at such community partners as Learning Works, Safe Space Shelter, and Spiral Arts. Over the summer, WGS will offer two sections of Introduction to Women and Gender Studies as well as three online electives: Gender in African Literature and Film; Gender and Aging; and Cinema and Women.

Women and Gender Studies at USM also enhances the cultural, intellectual, and political life of the campus and the surrounding community through the presentation of films, lectures and performances; many of the WGS programming events are free and all of them are open to the public. The full list of spring programming events, including times, locations and admission charges (if any), can be found on the “events and programming” link on our website <http://usm.maine.edu/wgs/events-programming>  and inside the spring 2013 newsletter.

If you have any questions about upcoming events, specific WGS courses, or majoring or minoring in the program, just drop us an email <wgs@usm.maine.edu>, call the office 780-4289, or come by WGS (94 Bedford St. on the Portland campus, Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.).  We look forward to meeting you.

Warm regards,
Wendy Chapkis
Director of Women and Gender Studies and Professor of Sociology