Undergraduate Director: Profs. Katherine Biers (Fall) and Julie Crawford (Spring), 763 Schermerhorn Extension; 854-3277; klb2134@columbia.edu; jc830@columbia.edu

Program Office: 763 Schermerhorn Extension; 854-3277; 854-7466 (fax)

Located with the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and taught in cooperation with Barnard College’s Women’s Studies Department, the program in women's and gender studies provides students with a culturally and historically situated, theoretically diverse understanding of feminist scholarship and its contributions to the disciplines. The program is intended to introduce students to the long arc of feminist discourse about the cultural and historical representation of nature, power, and the social construction of difference. It encourages students to engage in the debates regarding the ethical and political issues of equality and justice that emerge in such discussion, and it links the questions of gender and sexuality to those of racial, ethnic, and other kinds of hierarchical difference.

Through sequentially organized courses in women’s and gender studies, as well as required discipline-based courses in the humanities and social sciences, the major provides a thoroughly interdisciplinary framework, methodological training, and substantive guidance in specialized areas of research. Small classes and mentored thesis-writing give students an education that is both comprehensive and tailored to individual needs. The major culminates in a two-semester thesis-writing class, in which students undertake original research and produce advanced scholarship.

Graduates leave the program well prepared for future scholarly work in women’s and gender studies, but the major also prepares students for careers and future training in law, public policy, social work, community organizing, journalism, and all those professions in which there is a need for critical and creative interdisciplinary thought.