Welcome to GWS!
The Department of Gender & Women's Studies offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the formation of gender and its intersections with other relations of power, such as sexuality, race, class, nationality, religion, and age. Questions are addressed within the context of a transnational world and from perspectives as diverse as history, sociology, literary and cultural studies, postcolonial theory, science, new technology, and art.
Learn more about our Undergraduate Programs
The department offers an undergraduate major and minor and participates in the campus-wide Undergraduate Student Learning Initiative which assists students in understanding and achieving specific departmental and general learning goals. It also houses an undergraduate minor in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender studies, a program whose courses overlap productively with feminist studies.
Graduate Studies in GWS
Ph.D. students at Berkeley may add a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality (DEWGS) to their major fields. Designed to enhance interdisciplinary graduate studies at Berkeley, the DEWGS provides curricular and research resources and opportunities to students who are already admitted to graduate degree programs on campus. Combine your areas of interest and enhance your graduate degree by adding an emphasis in Women and Gender to the graduate degree you are completing in a related field.
Transdisciplinary and Transnational Research
The award-winning research conducted by our faculty has played a formative role in shaping studies of gender and sexuality worldwide, and continues to contribute prominently to critical thinking about - and to complicate understandings of - gender within the most pressing issues of our day. Our dynamic research embodies the diversity, multi-disciplinarity, and political commitments that characterize the field of Gender and Women's Studies.
Meet Our Faculty
Meet our faculty from tenure track faculty to lecturers, emerita, affiliated faculty and visiting scholars. Faculty in the department collaborate with an extensive group of faculty across campus. Gender and Women's Studies students get significant personalized attention from our faculty. Our department is known for its investment in the well-being of our students, and its smaller size means that it is somewhat easier to cultivate a community among undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff.
