What is Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS)?

Today GWS offers compelling analyses derived from evidence-based research conducted through mixed methodology. We are proudly interdisciplinary, blending insights from a variety of different academic fields and contributing transformative research to the university mission and public sphere. As a department, we excel in transnational analyses of racial, sexual, and gendered economies, histories, and narratives that shape geopolitical structures as well as everyday lives. Our faculty are highly sought after experts whose award-winning teaching puts students first. In fact, it was through student demand that GWS was created. 

GWS as an academic field emerged in the 1970s because curricula were dominated by issues and inquiries developed almost exclusively by men not attuned to different points of view. How history, literature, society, politics, economics, medicine, science, and cultures were studied often omitted women’s perspectives and realities. GWS served higher education by expanding the scope of intellectual inquiry to women’s experiences and questions. In the 1990s the field of GWS expanded its scholarly scope to embrace questions about men’s lived experience, too. How do different eras, societies, economic realities, and cultural norms shape men’s everyday lives and their sense of themselves? How do ideas about masculinity as well as femininity change over time and in different contexts? 

Against the backdrop of questions like these, gender became a useful category of analysis for scholars and students in higher education. Without recognizing how gender permeates human experience, thought, and history, full knowledge of humanity evades us.

What is the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at University of Kentucky (UK)?

UK’s GWS champions multiple perspectives by producing award-winning and internationally recognized scholarship and teaching. With faculty who hail from a variety of racial, ethnic, geographical, sexual, class, and national origins and 7 different disciplinary traditions, we constantly embrace new ideas, challenging ourselves and others to multiply points of view. In the past 5 years, our faculty have produced or been awarded:

• Five monographs through major academic presses, including Duke University Press, University of California Press, University of North Carolina Press, University of Michigan Press.
• 10 fellowships and esteemed visiting positions at other institutions.
• 46 articles in top ranked, peer-reviewed journals.
• Three endowed chairs.
• Six teaching awards, including those bestowed by the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Education and the Provost Office.

Please visit the Community and Engagement page to learn more about the department and read our mission statement. 

Administration and Staff

Chair:
Carol Mason
213 Breckinridge Hall
859-257-1788
carol.mason@uky.edu