The Student Experience in Gender & Women's Studies

A letter to prospective students

From Mab Segrest, Fuller-Maathai Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and GWS Chair

I am pleased that you are interested in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at Connecticut College. As Chair of GWS for six years now, every day I am excited and grateful for the opportunity to teach and "do"gender with this generation of young women and men. I am especially proud that Gender and Women's Studies at Connecticut College uses a transnational feminist framework, which allows our fullest exploration of the complexities of identity and power that gender helps to comprise, across geography and history.

Why choose GWS?

Students come to GWS because we combine a set of core courses - to take you from the basics of transnational feminism to advanced understanding and application of transnational feminist theory, methodology and practice - with a range of interdisciplinary electives that allow you to shape your major according to your particular interests and talents. Students like you also choose GWS because you enjoy being passionately engaged with your studies and your world - as intellectuals, activists, artists, and writers who will apply your knowledge of gender in your work, families and communities, intelligently and creatively, for your entire lives.

This department follows ideas, movements, and bodies across all kinds of disciplinary and political boundaries to arrive at the new syntheses and insights that are necessary for creating local and global communities of justice, sustainability and peace in the 21st century. What could be more important or exciting than that!

Where on campus is GWS?

GWS is housed with the College's Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at 740 Williams Street - a home recently converted to office spaces, classrooms, and meeting spaces. Students using the seminar room enjoy raiding out cabinets for snacks and tea at breaks, or using the open spaces for installations or meetings, or the kitchen and deck for dinners with other students and professors to benefit worthy causes such as hurricane relief.

Student Advisory Board and graduate study

You should know, too, that our students play an important role in our department's activities through the Student Advisory Board.

GWS graduates have gone on to law school or to master's program in public policy or teaching or to PhD programs in gender studies or other disciplines to work with non-profits on women's issues particularly or social justice issues more broadly.

I love teaching GWS because our students would rather live full and thoughtful lives, bravely, than conform to idiotic and destructive gender stereotypes that lead to cautious and callous lives and the waste of intellect and spirit. I hope you'll join them and us.

Sincerely,

Mab Segrest,
Fuller-Maathai Professor of Gender and Women's Studies
Chair

Last Modified: Thursday, May 22, 2008 11:50