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Graduate Consortium

Brandeis University is one of nine degree-granting institutions in the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (GCWS) located at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The other participating institutions are Boston College, Boston University, Harvard University, Northeastern University, Simmons College, Tufts University and UMass Boston. Each semester the GCWS offers interdisciplinary, team-taught seminars to students matriculated in member school graduate programs.

Courses taken through the GCWS transfer as electives outside the student’s home department. The exception is the GCWS course Feminist Inquiry: Strategies of Effective Scholarship, which counts as the feminist research methodologies requirement.

Fall 2009 GCWS Courses

Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies
FALL & SPRING, Tuesdays, 1:00 - 4:00 PM
9.9.00 - 5.10.10
Meets every other week at MIT, building and room TBA 

A writing workshop for dissertation writers.  Classes will include presentation and discussion of students’ work-in-progress.  Discussion will move back and forth between theoretical considerations and practical ones as we address three subjects central to dissertation work: data and the archive, methodology, and explanation or interpretation.  Students will be asked to reflect on ways that feminism and gender studies have affected their discipline’s views of what data are considered relevant and on the question of what body of materials is best suited to answer the questions raised in each of their dissertations.  We will also consider general issues of scholarly method, methodological issues that feminism and gender studies have raised, and methodological issues prominent within the major topics of the participants’ different disciplinary fields.   The inquiry into explanation and interpretation will ask how dissertation writers convince various audiences that their work is significant.  Each student will also give an oral presentation that has been consciously adapted for an interdisciplinary audience.  Enrollment is limited to ten students.

Faculty

Janet Z. Giele is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Social Policy, and Women’s Studies at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University.  Her research focuses on the changing life course of women and the emergence of American family policy.  She is the author, editor, or co-editor of Women:  Roles and Status in Eight Countries (1977), Women and the Future (1978), Women in the Middle Years (1982), Women and Work: The Continuing Struggle Worldwide (1992), Two Paths to Women’s Equality (1995), Methods of Life Course Research (1998), Women's Equality in the Workplace (2004), Changing Life Patterns in Western Industrial Societies (2004), and The Craft of Life Course Research (2009).

Spring 2010 GCWS Courses

Gender and Poverty in the United States
Tuesdays, 5:00 - 8:00 PM
2.2.10 - 5.4.10
Meets at MIT, building and room TBA

Faculty

Randy Albelda is a professor of economics and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Social Policy at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research and teaching covers a broad range of economic policies affecting low-income women and families.     She is the coauthor of the books Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits:  Women’s Work, Women’s Poverty, Unlevel Playing Fields:  Understanding Wage Inequality and Wage Discrimination, and The War on the Poor:  A Defense Manual.  

Deborah Belle is Professor of Psychology at Boston University. Her research has focused on stress and depression among low-income mothers, women's social networks and supports, and women in science careers.  Her books include Lives in stress: Women and depression, and The after-school lives of children: Alone and with others while parents work. 

Lisa Dodson is research professor in the sociology department at Boston College. She teaches and conducts research about low-income mothers and families. She wrote Don’t Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America and recent articles include “Wage Poor Mothers and Moral Economy” and “Poor Women and Habits of Hiding: Participatory Methods in Poverty Research.”  Her forthcoming book is The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert the Unfair Economy.

SCREEN WOMEN: Body Narratives in
Popular American Film
Thursdays, 6-9 PM
2.4.10 – 5.13.10
Meets at MIT, building and room TBA

Faculty

Emily Fox-Kales, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of eating disorders and body disturbances in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She also is on the faculty of Northeastern University where she teaches film, gender and cultural studies in the Cinema Studies program. She has served as Film Editor of the journal Gender & Psychoanalysis and published on psycho-social narratives of the woman’s body. Her forthcoming book is Body Shots: Hollywood and the Culture of Eating Disorders.

Suzanne Leonard is Assistant Professor of English at Simmons College, where she teaches film studies, feminist theory, and women’s literature. Her published articles have appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, MELUS, and in various anthologies including Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Duke UP, 2007) and Feminism, Domesticity, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2008). Her forthcoming book on Fatal Attraction (2009) is an inaugural text in Wiley-Blackwell’s series, Studies in Film and Television.

Feminist Inquiry
Wednesdays, 5:30 - 8:30 pm
2.3.10 – 5.12.10
Meets at MIT, building and room TBA

Faculty

Modhumita Roy is Associate Professor of English and Director of the undergraduate Women's Studies program at Tufts University.  

Jill McLean Taylor , Ed.D. is a Professor of Education, and Women's and Gender Studies at Simmons College, and chair of WGST.