For the current list of courses offered, see the course schedules. WGSS has introduced thematic concentration areas. Students may choose (but are NOT required to) from among the six thematic clusters or design an entirely different concentration alongside their advisor. The informal thematic clusters are listed below. Additional courses not included under a thematic cluster are listed at the end.


1. Black Feminist Thought

Courses in this cluster ground students in the development of Black Diasporic feminist scholarship and praxis. Students are exposed to how the lived realities of Black women have informed theories such as intersectionality by engaging in selected works by and about Black women on their spiritual, political, erotic, cultural, and aesthetic traditions and practices.

2. Bodies, Technologies, and Environments

Courses in this cluster explore relationships between science and technology and gender, race, class, and identity, with particular attention paid to bodies as a site where these relationships can be investigated. Courses variously examine racial and gendered biases in science and technology; the representation of bodies across medicine, media, and politics; how bodies are shaped in relation to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, technology, and power; social, economic, and political inequalities underlying health and health care disparities; and reproductive and environmental justice movements.

3. Literature, Arts, and Representation

Courses in this cluster explore how cultural representations—whether literary, visual, or performative—frame and reflect upon social hierarchies. Putting cultural productions in their historical contexts, these courses address how gender, sexuality, race, and other social categories are imaginatively and materially represented and the effects of these representations in both reinforcing and challenging social values.

4. Politics, Inequality, and Social Justice

This cluster of courses considers forms of hierarchy that exist across the world and within the United States, including those based on gender, sexuality, race, nation, and class. The courses address how such hierarchies are made or potentially unmade by states, labor markets, familial, educational, and religious institutions, and social movements and advocacy groups. They focus on developing students’ vocabulary, frameworks, and analytical skills related to the politics of inequality and social transformation.

5. Queer+  Studies

This cluster of classes centers on the social production and regulation of sexuality. Included are courses drawn from the humanities, the humanistic social sciences, and various interdisciplinary programs. Courses address multiple issues, including the functioning of sexual normativity and how it shapes social, political, and economic structures and institutions and the LGBTQ+ communities and politics.

6. Sexuality and Sex

This cluster allows students to explore how knowledges of the human body are shaped by intersecting identities such as gender, race, ethnicity, and ability (among others) and how these various bodies engage in practices of self-definition and resistance. 

7. Race and Racism

This cluster of classes engages in a critical and/or comparative study of race and racism through a lens of gender, class, and nation-state. This set of courses examines and addresses how race and racism operate within our institutions and communities at the local, national, and global levels.

Additional WGSS Courses

Below are additional WGSS courses not listed under a specific thematic cluster. The courses marked with an asterisk fulfill either a WGSS major or minor requirement.