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Global Gender Studies: About The Program
About Our Degrees
Acceptance Criteria
Minimum GPA of 2.0 overall.
WS 101 Introduction to Gender and Women's Studies
WS 205 Women in the Global System OR WS 241 Women in Developing Countries: Socio-economic and Political perspectives
WS 228 Introduction to Feminist Theory
WS 330 Global Women's Voices OR WS 414 Contemporary Global and Gender Issues
WS 490 Senior Thesis OR WS 497 Department Honors Thesis OR WS 498 UG Research and Creative Activities
The Global Gender Studies curriculum offers courses across three inter-related areas in Cultures and Identities, Women and Global Citizenship, and Gender and Public Policy. Our objective is to provide female and male students with the critical thinking skills to link local and global knowledge, so as to prepare them with the capacity to link gender and history, literature and policy, and to be able to apply these understandings to graduate work and their future employment and careers.
The Department of Global Gender Studies currently has approximately 30 majors, with an ever-increasing number of students who choose to minor or joint major in Global Gender Studies.
As a continuation, students enter the graduate program in Global Gender Studies which currently offers master's (M.A.) and doctoral (Ph.D.) degrees through the Department of American Studies, its former academic home. (Note: the application to offer M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Global Gender Studies through the Department of Global Gender Studies is currently pending).
Degree Requirements
Please see Degrees and Policies.
Minimum GPA of 2.0 overall.
WS 101 Introduction to Gender and Women's Studies
WS 205 Women in the Global System OR WS 241 Women in Developing Countries: Socio-economic and Political perspectives
WS 228 Introduction to Feminist Theory
WS 330 Global Women's Voices OR WS 414 Contemporary Global and Gender Issues
WS 490 Senior Thesis OR WS 497 Department Honors Thesis OR WS 498 UG Research and Creative Activities
The Global Gender Studies curriculum offers courses across three inter-related areas in Cultures and Identities, Women and Global Citizenship, and Gender and Public Policy. Our objective is to provide female and male students with the critical thinking skills to link local and global knowledge, so as to prepare them with the capacity to link gender and history, literature and policy, and to be able to apply these understandings to graduate work and their future employment and careers.
The Department of Global Gender Studies currently has approximately 30 majors, with an ever-increasing number of students who choose to minor or joint major in Global Gender Studies.
As a continuation, students enter the graduate program in Global Gender Studies which currently offers master's (M.A.) and doctoral (Ph.D.) degrees through the Department of American Studies, its former academic home. (Note: the application to offer M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Global Gender Studies through the Department of Global Gender Studies is currently pending).
Degree Requirements
Please see Degrees and Policies.
About Our Courses
Global Gender Studies courses enjoy the use of fully equipped, technology rooms to enhance learning, incorporating the use of computer systems with web access and multi-media systems. WS 101 Introduction to Gender and Women's Studies is a good overview of what global gender studies offers students; however, for more advanced students, a discussion with the Director of Undergraduate Studies may help to place the student in a higher level course that addresses their current interests and academic focus.
For course descriptions, please see Courses.
For course descriptions, please see Courses.
About Our Faculty
Professor Barbara Wejnert, a multi-lingual native of Poland, has recently joined the University at Buffalo faculty as an Associate Professor by way of the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. Dr. Wejnert specializes in the effects of globalization and democratization on the lives and status of women. She currently serves on the editorial board for Marriage and Family Review and as a reviewer for a number of social sciences journals including the American Sociology Review and Social Forces. Her research projects have received funding from the Soros Foundation, Ford Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Her projects - the culmination of five years of work featured in the last edition of American Sociological Review - taps a database she created encompassing 200 years' worth of information relating to more than 120 political, economic, and social indicators of 177 countries, many of them former communist countries. This database is a web interactive database and is published with the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research in Ann Arbor. Her theoretical work associated with this project was published in the Annual Review of Sociology and the American Sociological Review. Her recent projects, forthcoming as books and journal papers, on issues of safe motherhood in globalized world, on effects of democratization on health and well being of women globally, as well as in impoverished cities in the United States, constitute an extension of prior research involvements. Professor Wejnert's biography was included in Biographical Record of Contemporary Achievement, published by Cambridge Press, Polonia: Slownik Biograficzny (Polish Immigrants Who is Who Biographical Dictionary) published in Warsaw and Trimesteriel Biographique de la Polonia published in Paris. Professor Wejnert is a recipient of two distinguished teaching awards; Distinguished Teacher at Cornell University, 2002; and Distinguished Teacher at Cornell University, 2004.
Professor Alexis De Veaux has a Ph.D. in American Studies with a Concentration in Women's Studies. A prominent, award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose work is internationally known, she is the author of several books, plays, short stories, children's books, two collections of poetry, and a biography of jazz legend Billie Holiday. Her biography, Warrior Poet, A Biography of Audre Lorde (W.W. Norton) has earned multiple prestigious awards, including the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award for Nonfiction (2005) and the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Biography (2004). In 2005, she was named Best Literary Artist by Buffalo's cultural newspaper, Artvoice, and in 2006, she was the recipient of a Milton Plesure Award Excellence in Teaching. She was awarded a Literary Legacy Award in November 2007, by Just Buffalo Literary Center, for outstanding service to the literary arts. At the undergraduate level, Professor De Veaux teaches courses on black women's diasporic literatures, women and speculative fiction, feminist studies, global women's voices, gender and popular culture.
Professor Piya Pangsapa joined the Department of Global Gender Studies in August 2001. She is a former Director of Undergraduate Studies of the department and is an affiliated faculty member of the Asian Studies at the University at Buffalo. Her areas of specialization include gender, work and civic engagement in Southeast Asia. She is the author of Textures of Struggle: The Emergence of Resistance among Garment Workers in Thailand (2007) published by Cornell University Press and co-author of two forthcoming books, Environment and Citizenship: Integrating Justice, Responsibility and Civic Engagement (Zed Books) and Responsible Politics: Bringing Together Labor Standards, Environment, and Human rights in the Global Corporate Economy (Palgrave Macmillan), as well as articles on migration, women's rights, labor standards, and ethnographic research methods. Her current work considers the impact of corporate responsibility on the global supply chain, the changing nature of factory production, and the status and citizenship rights of migrant workers, as well as transnational activist networks between NGOs, policy makers, states, communities, and local and regional campaigns on gender, labor and environmental issues.
Marieme S. Lo earned a Ph.D. and M.S. from Cornell University, M.A. from University of Dakar, and a B.A. from Paris 1 Panthon-Sorbonne. Dr. Lo was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. Dr. Lo's areas of specialization include the political economy of gender and development, with special emphasis on economic planning and public policies; education and human development; and rural development. As a gender and development expert and an advocate for social change, Dr. Lo worked and consulted for numerous international organizations including USAID, OXFAM, the United Nations agencies, and grassroots women's organizations in Africa. Dr. Lo's research interests include the politics and economics of gender and development; the informal economy, microfinance and female entrepreneurship; the gendered dimension of poverty and inequality; and global economic shift and transnationalism. She also interrogates emerging paradigms in the intersection between development, disaster and human security. Dr. Lo is a former Director of Graduate Studies.
Professor Gwynn Thomas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Gender Studies at the University at Buffalo. She received her doctorate in Political Science with specialties in Latin American Politics and Feminist Theory from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Thomas is interested in the intersection of gender and politics in Latin America, and in particular, how gender ideology has influenced beliefs about citizenship, national identity and state legitimacy. Professor Thomas teaches courses on issues of women and gender in Latin America, on feminist theory, and on issues of nationalism, citizenship and state development. At the undergraduate level, she routinely teaches WS 247 Women in Latin America, and WS 228 Introduction to Feminist Theory. Professor Thomas is revising a book manuscript entitled Ties that Bind and Break: The Uses of Family in the Political Struggles of Chile, 1970-1990, which examines how the family was used to define the relationship between the state and its citizens in the major political struggles of Chile from 1970-1990. She is also working on a series of articles that analyze the uses of gender in the election of Michelle Bachelet as president in Chile. She was awarded the Elsa Chaney Award given for the best paper on women and gender by the Gender and Feminist Section for her paper entitled What No Tie? Political Campaigns, Gender and Redefining Political Leadership in Chile, presented at the Latin American Studies Association 27th International Congress in 2007. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Tinker Foundation.
See a list of our Undergraduate Faculty.
Professor Alexis De Veaux has a Ph.D. in American Studies with a Concentration in Women's Studies. A prominent, award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose work is internationally known, she is the author of several books, plays, short stories, children's books, two collections of poetry, and a biography of jazz legend Billie Holiday. Her biography, Warrior Poet, A Biography of Audre Lorde (W.W. Norton) has earned multiple prestigious awards, including the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award for Nonfiction (2005) and the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Biography (2004). In 2005, she was named Best Literary Artist by Buffalo's cultural newspaper, Artvoice, and in 2006, she was the recipient of a Milton Plesure Award Excellence in Teaching. She was awarded a Literary Legacy Award in November 2007, by Just Buffalo Literary Center, for outstanding service to the literary arts. At the undergraduate level, Professor De Veaux teaches courses on black women's diasporic literatures, women and speculative fiction, feminist studies, global women's voices, gender and popular culture.
Professor Piya Pangsapa joined the Department of Global Gender Studies in August 2001. She is a former Director of Undergraduate Studies of the department and is an affiliated faculty member of the Asian Studies at the University at Buffalo. Her areas of specialization include gender, work and civic engagement in Southeast Asia. She is the author of Textures of Struggle: The Emergence of Resistance among Garment Workers in Thailand (2007) published by Cornell University Press and co-author of two forthcoming books, Environment and Citizenship: Integrating Justice, Responsibility and Civic Engagement (Zed Books) and Responsible Politics: Bringing Together Labor Standards, Environment, and Human rights in the Global Corporate Economy (Palgrave Macmillan), as well as articles on migration, women's rights, labor standards, and ethnographic research methods. Her current work considers the impact of corporate responsibility on the global supply chain, the changing nature of factory production, and the status and citizenship rights of migrant workers, as well as transnational activist networks between NGOs, policy makers, states, communities, and local and regional campaigns on gender, labor and environmental issues.
Marieme S. Lo earned a Ph.D. and M.S. from Cornell University, M.A. from University of Dakar, and a B.A. from Paris 1 Panthon-Sorbonne. Dr. Lo was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. Dr. Lo's areas of specialization include the political economy of gender and development, with special emphasis on economic planning and public policies; education and human development; and rural development. As a gender and development expert and an advocate for social change, Dr. Lo worked and consulted for numerous international organizations including USAID, OXFAM, the United Nations agencies, and grassroots women's organizations in Africa. Dr. Lo's research interests include the politics and economics of gender and development; the informal economy, microfinance and female entrepreneurship; the gendered dimension of poverty and inequality; and global economic shift and transnationalism. She also interrogates emerging paradigms in the intersection between development, disaster and human security. Dr. Lo is a former Director of Graduate Studies.
Professor Gwynn Thomas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Gender Studies at the University at Buffalo. She received her doctorate in Political Science with specialties in Latin American Politics and Feminist Theory from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Thomas is interested in the intersection of gender and politics in Latin America, and in particular, how gender ideology has influenced beliefs about citizenship, national identity and state legitimacy. Professor Thomas teaches courses on issues of women and gender in Latin America, on feminist theory, and on issues of nationalism, citizenship and state development. At the undergraduate level, she routinely teaches WS 247 Women in Latin America, and WS 228 Introduction to Feminist Theory. Professor Thomas is revising a book manuscript entitled Ties that Bind and Break: The Uses of Family in the Political Struggles of Chile, 1970-1990, which examines how the family was used to define the relationship between the state and its citizens in the major political struggles of Chile from 1970-1990. She is also working on a series of articles that analyze the uses of gender in the election of Michelle Bachelet as president in Chile. She was awarded the Elsa Chaney Award given for the best paper on women and gender by the Gender and Feminist Section for her paper entitled What No Tie? Political Campaigns, Gender and Redefining Political Leadership in Chile, presented at the Latin American Studies Association 27th International Congress in 2007. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Tinker Foundation.
See a list of our Undergraduate Faculty.
Practical Experience and Special Academic Opportunities
Internships
Internships are possible for academic credit in consultation with the Director of Undergraduate Studies and the supervising faculty member.
Independent Study
Independent study is available for academic credit in consultation with the Director of Undergraduate Studies and the supervising faculty member.
Internships are possible for academic credit in consultation with the Director of Undergraduate Studies and the supervising faculty member.
Independent Study
Independent study is available for academic credit in consultation with the Director of Undergraduate Studies and the supervising faculty member.
Extracurricular Activities
Undergraduate Global Gender Studies students, along with students from other departments, formed the Feminist Action Group, an activist group that raises awareness on campus of various gendered issues through public performances, actions and distribution of published materials.
Undergraduate students are encouraged to meet together in the Global Gender Studies lounge to develop a sense of community.
Undergraduate students are encouraged to meet together in the Global Gender Studies lounge to develop a sense of community.
Complementary Programs and Courses
The following departments well complement Global Gender Studies:
We have affiliated and cooperating faculty in all of these departments. Students in all fields of study can gain valuable knowledge and insight with involvement in Global Gender Studies courses.
- African American Studies
- American Studies
- Anthropology
- Asian Studies
- Art History
- Comparative Literature
- English
- History
- Media Study
- Nursing
- Political Science
- Romance Languages and Literatures
- Sociology
We have affiliated and cooperating faculty in all of these departments. Students in all fields of study can gain valuable knowledge and insight with involvement in Global Gender Studies courses.
Links to Further Information About This Program
- Undergraduate Catalog
- Undergraduate Admissions
- Graduate Admissions
- Department of Global Gender Studies
- College of Arts and Sciences
Last updated: Wednesday, 23-Apr-2008 15:43:13 EDT