We welcome your interest in our interdisciplinary GWS Graduate Certificate program.

The Certificate program in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky aims to train cutting-edge scholars of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. The GWS Graduate Certificate is over twenty years old. Students in the certificate program have a wide range of professional goals and research interests.  

Students may complete the certificate as a complement to a graduate disciplinary degree program or as a stand-alone curriculum. The aim of the Graduate Certificate curriculum is to provide a coherent, graduate-level interdisciplinary grounding in Gender and Women's Studies scholarship and to create an intellectual community among faculty and graduate students who share a scholarly interest in Gender and Women's Studies.

We are deeply committed to the academic innovations in both women’s studies, in which lived experiences of women worldwide are honored and used to expand traditional disciplinary knowledges, and gender studies, which examines how we ascribe gendered meanings to everyday objects, experiences, and relationships across space and time. Our curriculum is shaped by an intellectually and culturally diverse faculty whose areas of expertise complement each other in ways to ensure that students gain a variety of knowledge and skills, including the areas of transnational perspectives, critical theory, social justice frameworks, and interdisciplinary methodologies. Our faculty actively publish and teach across a broad range of topical areas including studies of gendered violence, social movements and activism, the law, reproductive justice, education, disability, masculinities, migration, body, popular culture, sexualities, queer theory, science and health.

In addition to regularly offering required courses in feminist theory, the history of feminist thought, and feminist research methodologies, we offer a broad range of GWS topical seminars and crossed listed courses (see the link to graduate courses on this website for further information about current course offerings). We also offer cross-listed graduate courses offered by GWS faculty affiliates. 

Students who are currently enrolled as a graduate student in a department at the University of Kentucky are encouraged to apply for the Gender and Women's Studies Graduate Certificate program and should consult with their advisor to apply as early as possible in their graduate career in order to allow time to complete the required courses.  Courses counting toward fulfillment of the Graduate Certificate curriculum must be taken after admission to the program, although students may petition for prior courses to count toward the certificate.

Information about the graduate certificate, the requirements for application and admission, and the requirements for the certificate are available on this website. If you have questions about the program after reading these materials, please contact us at GWSGradStudies@uky.edu 

We look forward to hearing from you!