Our new chair, Dr. Amanda Lock Swarr, delivered these remarks at our 2025 Fall Reception, a time students, faculty, and alumni come together to welcome in the new year.Welcome to the 2025/26 academic year in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. This is my first time addressing you as the incoming chair of the department, and I want to begin by thanking our outgoing chair Sasha Su-Ling Welland. Sasha's organization and vision were nothing short of remarkable. Our… Read more
On October 9, GWSS hosted Dr. Chi-ming Yang (University of Pennsylvania) for a packed and engaging talk, “A SciFi-Horse Girl’s Coming of Age: The Childhood Archives of Octavia E. Butler.”Drawing on years of archival research, Dr. Yang explored the formative influences that shaped the imagination of celebrated science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, including her early fascination with horses, her experiences growing up in segregated Pasadena, and the… Read more
Colleen Melody, who taught GWSS 310: Women and the Law in Spring 2024, has been appointed to the Washington State Supreme Court. Her path reflects the deep, long-lasting connections that define GWSS: Melody first encountered GWSS 310 as an undergraduate, when she took the course with longtime instructor Pat Novotny. Melody has described that class as a turning point, shaping both her intellectual commitments and her future in the law.When Melody returned years later to teach the class herself,… Read more
The UW Daily published a fantastic write-up of "Swim Parallel to the Shore," the lecture performance by artist Chloë Bass, presented in collaboration between Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies (GWSS) and the Henry Art Gallery.The article highlights Bass’s public art practice, the weeklong series of GWSS x Henry events, and reflections from GWSS faculty Dr. Kemi Adeyemi and Dr. Sasha Welland.Read the… Read more
In the spring of 2025, we launched a digital archive of our continuously growing GWSS Oral History Collection, a website designed by Sunaina Butler and Micaela Duran for their iSchool Capstone Project, with guidance from consultant Eileen Jerrett.
In the years leading up to the 50th anniversary of GWSS in 2021, faculty members identified the importance of documenting the department’s history. Who better to narrate that history than the… Read more
Edited collections play a crucial role in shaping disciplines: they set agendas, frame debates, and help define the contours of a field. Contributing to one is a significant professional milestone, and we’re thrilled to celebrate PhD candidate Saad Khan for earning this distinction.Khan has co-authored a chapter titled “Queer Prints, Publics, and Counterpublics in Bangladesh: The Coherent, In-Between, and Ephemeral,” which will appear in the forthcoming anthology… Read more
GWSS congratulates PhD student Yasmine Gomez, who has been selected for the Peter T. Johnson Fund for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, which supports UW students conducting research or presenting work related to Latin America and the Caribbean.Yasmine will use the award to travel to Bogotá, Colombia to present at the Plurifeminismos… Read more
GWSS PhD student Marielle Marcaida was honored this week as one of the 2025–2026 Graduate Labor Research Grant recipients at the annual UW Labor Studies Awards Celebration. As part of the event, Marcaida presented a research poster drawn from a chapter of her dissertation, It Takes a Village: The Human Rights Activism of Mothers Under the Philippine Drug War.The… Read more
GWSS alum and affiliate faculty member Shuxuan Zhou (PhD 2017) has been awarded a 2025 Grants for Artist Projects (GAP) grant from Artist Trust in the literary category. These annual awards provide project-based grants of $1,500 each to artists across Washington State. This year, Artist Trust distributed $97,500 to 65 recipients in what it described as “the most competitive GAP cohort in the program’s 36-year history.”As noted in their… Read more