Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (GCWS)
Brandeis University is one of nine degree-granting institutions in the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies located at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The other participating institutions are: Boston College, Boston University, Harvard University, M.I.T., 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. For further information about GCWS and to apply, please visit the GCWS website. You must also fill out the Brandeis University Cross-Registration Petition through the registrar’s office.
Fall 2007 GCWS Courses
Interrogating Marriage
September 4 - December 11, 2007
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Location: MIT Campus, building and room TBA
Is Marriage a patriarchal institution? Much feminist scholarship has characterized it that way, but now in the context of the recent Massachusetts Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, the meaning of marriage itself demands serious re-examination. This course will discuss history, literature, film, and legal evolution, making use of cross-cultural, sociological, anthropological and many other theoretical approaches to the marriage question from 1630 to the present. As it turns out, sex, marriage, and the family have never been stable institutions; to the contrary, they have continued to function as flash points for the very social and cultural questions that are central to gender studies scholarship. Committee, looking toward eventual publication, and writing with an eye to a professional position. Enrollment is limited to ten students.
Faculty:
Renée Bergland is Professor of English and Gender/Cultural Studies at Simmons College. She teaches courses in American literature and culture, gender studies, and literary and cultural theory. Her first book, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects, focuses on the Native American figures that haunt US cultural narratives. More recently, she wrote Computer of Venus: Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2007. Other current projects are an essay collection on the recently discovered Nineteenth-Century American novel The Hermaphrodite, and a monograph on the global Emily Dickinson.
Leonard Buckle is Associate Professor of Law, Policy and Society and served from 1985 to 2003 as Co-Director of the LPS program. He teaches negotiation and research methods and supervises dissertations in humanistic and social scientific approaches to the study of law and law-like institutions. He has done research in tobacco control, community-based dispute resolution and informal uses of the legal system. Before joining the Northeastern University faculty, he taught and conducted research at MIT's department of urban studies and planning, Tufts' department of political science and the Kennedy School of Government.
Suzann Thomas-Buckle is Associate Professor of Law, Policy and Society and served from 1985 to 2003 as Co-Director of the LPS program. She teaches interdisciplinary research methods and dispute resolution and supervises dissertations in the field of informal justice and the ad hoc construction of social control. Her academic interests include indigenous legal systems, conflict resolution and the construction of law through formal legislation and litigation and through informal processes in organizations and communities. Before joining the Northeastern University faculty, she taught and conducted research at MIT's department of urban studies and planning, Tufts' department of political science and the Kennedy School of Government. “I hope to do more work on writing of the west, to explore concepts of the west in future papers.”
Representing Gender: Global Perspectives on Art, Media, and Popular Culture
September 6, 2007 - December 13, 2007
Thursdays, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Location: MIT Campus, building and room TBA
This course explores and interrogates the ways in which social and cultural conventions construct sexuality, gender, race, class, ethnicity and nationality across a broad range of representations in art, popular culture and the communications media. Utilizing a global feminist perspective and drawing on examples from the US, China, India, Mexico, Japan, and South Africa, we will focus on thematic intersections and patterns of representation.
We examine the ways in which cultural, ideological, and generic conventions converge in a wide range of contemporary representational practices and how feminist theoretical and analytical approaches have attempted to account for a diverse range of influences and impulses.
Faculty:
Pamela Allara is Associate Professor Emerita at Brandeis University. An art historian, she teaches courses the history of women’s art, contemporary art, film, photography and visual culture. The author of a monograph on the American painter Alice Neel, (Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery, [1998/2000]), her recent research has been on activist art in South Africa. In 2003, she organized the exhibition, “Co-existence: Contemporary Cultural Production in South Africa” for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. During the 2005-6 academic year, she organized two exhibitions: “Geobodies: A Question of Boundaries” for the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, and “Cross-Current In Recent Video Installation: Water as Metaphor for Identity” for the Tufts University Art Gallery.
Lisa Cuklanz is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Boston College. She is author of Rape on Trial: How the Mass Media Construct Legal Reform and Social Change (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Her research interests focus on mass media representations of gendered violence. Her work has been published in journals including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Women's Studies in Communication, Communication Quarterly, and Journal of Gender Studies.
Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies
Fall & Spring Semesters
Wednesdays, 4:00 - 7:00 pm
Location: MIT Campus, building and room TBA
*Meets every other week*
A writing workshop for dissertation writers at all levels, beginning with preparation of the proposal. Class will include rotating discussion in each meeting of pre-circulated material by one or two students. In addition to a constructive critique of your writing, we will focus on: theoretical and methodological concepts in Women’s and Gender Studies cross disciplines; research, argumentation, and writing; practical matters such as: the Dissertation Committee, looking toward eventual publication, and writing with an eye to a professional position. Enrollment is limited to ten students.
Faculty:
Erica Harth is Professor Emerita (as of 2006) of Humanities and Women's Studies at Brandeis University. Her original scholarly field is early modern French literature and culture. Among her several published books in this field is Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); and she is the author of numerous articles and essays. Her most recent book is an edited collection of original essays, which she commissioned, on the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans (New York: St. Martins/Palgrave, 2001 and 2003).
Spring 2008 GCWS Courses
Transsexuality, Transgenderism, and the Rest...
January 31 - May 8, 2008
Thursdays, 4:00 - 7:00 pm
Location: Harvard University, building and room TBA
This course will cover narrative, anthropological, historical, and theoretical texts (including films) about transsexuality and transgenderism. We begin with transsexuality before and beyond identity politics and its transformation in the light/shadow of identity politics and theories of gender. While the course will remain located in the Americas and Europe, we will consider how trans-subjectivities produced in other socio-cultural formations inform histories and politics of transsexuality and transgenderism in so-called western contexts.
Faculty:
Claudia Castañeda teaches feminist science and technology studies in Boston area universities, and works as a writing coach for academics at all stages of the research/writing process. She is the author of Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (Duke University Press, 2002), and other articles that focus on scientific and technological materialization of bodily differences including race, class, gender, and sexuality in broader circuits of power and exchange.
Afsaneh Najmabadi teaches History and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her last book, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), received the 2005 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association. She is an associate editor of the six-volume Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Leiden: Brill, 2004-2008), and is currently working on Sex in Change: Configurations of Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Iran.
Jyoti Puri writes and teaches in the areas of sexualities, states, nationalisms, and transnational feminisms. Her book, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India (Routledge 1999), addresses how constructs of gender and sexuality are shaped across national and transnational contexts. Encountering Nationalism, (Blackwell Publishers 2004), is a feminist sociological exploration of nationalism and the state. A number of related articles and chapters are published in journals and edited volumes on sexuality and gender. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants, including a Rockefeller Research Fellowship and a Fulbright Senior Research award. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Sexualizing the State: Biopolitics and Sodomy Law in India.
Feminist Inquiry: Strategies for Effective Scholarship
January 31 - May 8, 2008
Thursdays, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Location: MIT campus, building and room TBA
This course investigates theories and practices of feminist inquiry across a range of disciplines. Doing feminist research involves rethinking disciplinary assumptions and methodologies, developing new understandings of what counts as knowledge, seeking alternative ways of understanding the origins of problems/issues, formulating new ways of asking questions and redefining the relationship between subjects and objects of study. The course will focus on methodology, i.e., the theory and analysis of how research should proceed. We shall be especially attentive to epistemological issues--pre-suppositions about the nature of knowledge. What makes research distinctively feminist lies in the complex connections between epistemologies, methodologies and research methods? We shall explore how these connections are formed in the traditional disciplines and raise questions about why they are inadequate and/or problematic for feminist inquiry and what, specifically, are the feminist critiques of these intersections.
Faculty:
Laurie Crumpacker (Professor and Chair of History; Acting Chair of Women’s Studies at Simmons College.) She holds a B.S. from Simmons in English/Education, an M.A. from Harvard/Radcliffe in English Literature, and a Ph.D. from Boston University in American Studies. At Simmons, she was founding Director of the Women’s Studies Program (now the Department of Women and Gender Studies) and also of the Liberal Studies/ Women’s Studies Masters Program (now the Gender and Cultural Studies Program). She has been the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Susquehanna University and at Wheelock College. Her publications include The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr (Yale, 1984) and Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women (U. Nebraska, 1994). She has recently written articles on African American and white working women’s education and on the impact of feminist theory on liberal education.
Frinde Maher is Professor of Education at Wheaton College, where she directs the Secondary Education Program. She has taught Women’s Studies courses for many years, including, for the past decade, Feminist Theory. She has published widely in the fields of feminist pedagogy and women in education, and is co-author, with Mary Kay Tetreault, of two books: The Feminist Classroom (1994; second edition 2001) and Privilege and Diversity in the Academy (2007).