Welcome Students and Friends,
USM’s Women and Gender Studies program (WGS) will be celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2010. The program was the first in the state of Maine and continues to be one of the most innovative and vibrant. This semester, over a 150 students (including about two dozen majors) are enrolled in Women and Gender Studies courses examining gender differences in the economy, culture and politics.
The program is also committed to looking at how gender intersects with other “differences” such as class, race, nationality, and sexuality. The Women and Gender Studies program is responsible for bringing to USM the campus’s first Fulbright Scholar in Residence, Dr. Amy Tsanga, a feminist scholar from Zimbabwe (in 2001) and Dr. Perween Hasan of Pakistan (in 2004). This year, the program has secured a major federal grant to develop a partnership with women faculty at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. In receiving this grant, WGS became the first Women and Gender Studies program in the country to formally partner with a university in the Muslim Middle East.
Every year, the program also offers excellent cultural and intellectual programming including special events during Women's History Month in March. These programs feature nationally and internationally prominent scholars, writers and performers and draw audiences from across the campus and the surrounding community.
If you would like more information about the program, just drop by our office on the Portland campus (at 94 Bedford St.). Or give us a call (or send an email) and we’ll put you on our mailing list for upcoming events.
Warm regards,
Wendy Chapkis
Director of Women and Gender Studies and Professor of Sociology
University of Southern Maine
94 Bedford St., Portland
(207) 780-4955
chapkis@usm.maine.edu
