Graduate
Concentrations
Women, Gender, and Literature
The graduate concentration in Women, Gender, and Literature reflects the department's understanding that much of the most exciting work in contemporary literary studies involves the crossing of strict disciplinary boundaries. Several departments and programs including Anthropology, Comparative Literature, History, Government, Middle Eastern Studies, and the Department of Oriental and African Languages offer women's studies and gender studies courses, and English Department graduate students are encouraged to draw on these resources in pursuing the Women, Gender, and Literature concentration. The department itself contains a large and active group of feminist scholars who represent every major position within contemporary feminist criticism.
In addition to its wide interests and expertise in British and American women's writing (Brooks, Carter, Chapelle Wojciehowski, Cullingford, Cvetkovich, S. Heinzelman, MacKay, Moore), the group is centrally engaged in cross-cultural study and offers courses that examine women's experience and gender construction in Arabic, Asian, Latin-American, Irish, African-British, and African-American societies (Carter, Cullingford, Harlow, Heng, Woodard). Faculty specialties extend as well to representations of gender and sexuality in film, materialist and Marxist feminist theory (Cvetkovich, Harlow, Woodard); the politics of sexuality (Cvetkovich, Heng, Moore, Woods); women, speech, and writing practices (Henkel, Woods); feminist analysis of legal, scientific, and academic history and institutions (Hedrick, S. Heinzelman); and lesbian and gay literature and culture (Cvetkovich, Moore).