In Fall 2025, our department partnered with the Henry Art Gallery to bring acclaimed interdisciplinary artist Chloë Bass to campus. As part of Bass' visit, four undergraduate students were selected to create original audio companions to her sculptural installation at Volunteer Park, collectively titled Soft Services…
GWSS knows that our departmental staff are the best in the business — now the entire campus knows! Whitney Miller was honored at the 2026 Distinguished Staff Awards this winter.Miller joined the department in 2021 as Program Coordinator and Graduate Program Advisor, stepping into the role during COVID. From the start, she brought a rare combination of administrative expertise, creative thinking, and genuine investment in the department's intellectual life — approaching every aspect of her work…
Our department recently partnered with Cinema & Media Studies to bring director Maria Breaux to campus for a screening of and conversation about their 2022 film, Vulveeta. This improvised mockumentary follows Grrrilda Beausoleil as she attempts to reunite her 1990s riot grrrl band. Beausoleil didn’t leave the band on very good terms, and she attempts to reunite with them amidst long-standing personal tensions and against the backdrop of a rapidly changed city.The screening brought…
Our department recently came together for a hybrid conversation and creative workshop to launch the book Navigating Academia as a Transnational Scholar from the Global South: Treasuring All the Knowledges, a collection that weaves together the experiences of 16 women and non-binary scholars who navigated postgraduate life as non-elite international students and (un)documented migrants in countries wealthier than their own.The book was co-edited by Iris Viveros (recently minted GWSS PhD…
Petrus Liu has been a presence in our graduate seminars for the past two years, as his work assigned and wrestled with across multiple courses. His March visit gave our community the chance to bring that engagement into the room with him. Graduate students, faculty, and undergraduates packed together for his talk, ready for a conversation that had, in many ways, already been building.Liu, Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature and of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston…
GWSS is excited to announce that PhD student Shelley Pryde has been selected as a 2026 Fellow in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) Publishing Workshop.The highly competitive program, which received a record number of applicants this year, offers intensive training in publishing across book and magazine tracks. Pryde has also received a full fellowship, sponsored by the Los Angeles Review of Books in partnership…
Congratulations to Marielle Marcaida, who successfully passed her written and oral exams and is off to the Philippines to continue her doctoral research.During their exams, students create connections between 100+ books that they’ve read and their own proposed doctoral research. In hers, Marielle brilliantly elaborated upon her dissertation project, "Salvaging Maria: Urban Poor Mothers’ Resistance against the Philippine Drug War.” Through primarily ethnographic research in Manila, Marielle…
GWSS PhD candidate Ramon Johnson has been featured by the UW Graduate School in a recent student spotlight, “Finding the Path.” The piece highlights Ramon’s dissertation work examining progress narratives at Historically Black colleges and universities, as well as his approach to scholarship grounded in love and accountability.…