As a gender studies scholar and medical anthropologist, I create learning environments that develop my students’ abilities to critically engage with complex empirical phenomena such as gender, race, and science. Students leave my courses able to recognize the nuance and the significance of such concepts, and with deeper insight into their own learning processes. To this end, I ask students to inhabit multiple roles over the term (reader, facilitator, editor, discussant), as well as integrate opportunities for students to articulate their own goals and engage with primary source materials. In these ways, students at all levels actively engage with course content, increasing their topic knowledge and developing skills which are widely applicable in and outside of the classroom.

Theories of Gender and Sexuality

This is a one-quarter, seminar-style course for undergraduates. Its aim is triple: to engage scenes and concepts central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality; to provide familiarity with key theoretical anchors for that study; and to provide skills for deriving the theoretical bases of any kind of method. Students will produce descriptive, argumentative, and experimental engagements with theory and its scenes as the quarter progresses. We will “read” (watch, listen, attend) vigorously and expansively, across the social sciences and humanities, and consider our work a collective engagement with central questions such as -

1. how are arguments and theoretical claims about gender and sexuality made? how does genre or form shape such arguments? what kind of arguments might we (you) hope to make?

2. how are do gender and sexuality operate as experiences? as identities? what other objects and concepts -- about politics, about desire -- inform arguments about gender and sexuality?

3. what is considered “natural” in domains of gender and sexuality? how are such claims evidenced, explored, and challenged?

These are not exhaustive or exclusive topics but provide some insight into where the conversations in seminar may go, and how we will organize the intellectual work of the course.

Full Syllabus Here

B.A. Thesis Seminar

The Gender and Sexuality Studies B.A. Seminar is designed to guide you through the research and writing of your BA thesis in Gender and Sexuality Studies. By the end of the Autumn Quarter, you will have a detailed proposal as well as a substantial portion of your research or writing completed. Our meetings will help to break up the research and writing process into manageable tasks that will move you through the various stages of your project. Many sessions will be run as a peer workshop. The goal of the Autumn and Winter seminars is to ensure that each student produces a well-written, well-argued, honors-worthy BA paper for submission in the Spring.

Full Syllabus Here