07/10/2019 - GWS congratulates Shwetha Delanthamajalu on her recent article, which was awarded The Znaniecki Published Paper Award by the Department of Sociology. Delanthamajalu is a graduate student in Sociology and will be working for Gender and Women's Studies next year as a teaching assistant.

05/20/2019 - The Department of Gender and Women's Studies is pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Maryam Kashani has been awarded the 2019 Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Academy of Education.

05/13/2019 - This year's GWS Outstanding Awards recognize the vital work of mentoring students.

05/03/2019 - Call for Participation: Conversations among GWS Graduate Minors and Interested Graduate Students

04/22/2019 - Shameem Razack has been awarded the 2019 Jean Alice Scharre Thompson Scholarship from the Department of Gender and Women's Studies. Shameem also recently received the DiversityEd Social Justice Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Student. A transfer student from Parkland, Shameem has only been on campus for a year, but she has already become a leader in promoting the visibility and rights of marginalized peoples.

04/08/2019 - Megan Gargiulo from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese received the Marianne A. Ferber Scholarship for her dissertation project, entitled "Race, Gender, and Recogimiento: Discursive Negotiations of Space, Sexuality, and Productivity in Late Colonial Mexico." Honorable mention went to Rachel Storm (EPOL)for her proposal, “Restorative Justice and Sexual Violence: The Views of Victim’s Advocates.”

04/03/2019 - The history of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies is the featured exhibit this month at the Main Library building. The display highlights key moments in the four decades of the department, spotlights the 1986 National Women’s Studies Association Conference which was held at Illinois, and celebrates the work of several GWS faculty members. GWS thanks Gender and Multicultural Services Librarian Cindy Ingold and Mary Elmquist, graduate assistant from the Social Socials, Health, and Education Library for creating an amazing exhibit. Look for the finger puppet of Michel Foucault!

04/02/2019 - The Discovery Partners Institute will provide a seed grant for a project headed by Terri Barnes (GWS and History), Mauro Nobili (History) and Laila Hussein Mustafa (International Area Studies Library). Their group seeks to create innovative education materials in gaming and/or virtual reality formats as vehicles for research, teaching and engagement, while conserving digital version of vulnerable African sites and materials.

01/15/2019 - Olivia Hagedorn from the Department of History was awarded the 2019 Smalley Fellowship in Gender and Women's Studies for her dissertation proposal entitled "'Call Me African': Black Women and Disaporic Cultural Feminism in Chicago, 1930-1980."

01/08/2019 - Toby Beauchamp has been named a 2019-2020 Helen Corley Petit Scholar, which is awarded for the "development of the scholarship and teaching of early career faculty members in the College." In addition to the title of Helen Corley Petit Scholar, the award comes with funds to support research and teaching. Professor Beauchamp's book, Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices, was released this month by Duke University Press.

12/06/2018 - Throughout the 1960s and 70s thousands of young men and women left Iran to seek education and opportunity abroad. A group of particularly adventurous and charismatic friends met up in San Francisco. Best in the West locates their experiences, as young men establishing their lives in a new country, within the context of the Vietnam War, changes in Iran, and the social, political, and musical atmosphere of San Francisco in the 60s and 70s. See Best in the West on vimeo.

10/25/2018 - A binary system of gender is not a fact of nature. Nor is it politically neutral. It has been (and is being) wielded and enforced as a way to consolidate power and to stigmatize, target, discipline, punish, and exclude those who are deemed non-conforming: usually transgender people, intersex people, indigenous people, people of color, people with disabilities, queers, immigrants, women, and others who often demonstrate that alternative models of gender are both viable and valuable. A binary system of gender is enforced through many forms of violence, including the violence of erasure. These are foundational concepts in transgender, queer, and feminist scholarship.

10/23/2018 - Ruth Nicole Brown has devoted her career to what she calls “engaged scholarship” with black girls to create new worlds with, ask questions of, and celebrate black girlhood. The professor of gender and women’s studies remains active on campus, in the surrounding Urbana-Champaign area, and across the United States co-organizing spaces dedicated to humanistic inquiry, the documentation of black girlhood culture, and collective knowledge production about the myriad ways social and political conditions shape and are shaped by black girls.

07/26/2018 - Elizabeth Corr is one of the first students to graduate with a degree from Illinois in Gender and Women's Studies in 2004. As the Director of Art Partnerships at the National Resources Defense Council in Chicago, she works with artists, architects, and designers to heighten public awareness of and interest in the environmental issues that face today’s communities. She launched NRDC’s Artist-in-Residence program and is expanding support for NRDC’s art and climate–related projects, from such organizations as the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Public Concern Foundation, and Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.

05/10/2018 - GWS Professor CL Cole heads the Department of Media and Cinema Studies.