Message from the Chair

Welcome to the UCLA Department of Gender Studies. Located in the Division of Social Sciences in UCLA’s College of Letters and Science, Gender Studies is home to the College’s largest interdisciplinary faculty and one of the first PhD programs in our field globally. With nineteen core faculty — including two endowed departmental chairs and one endowed divisional chair — and fourteen joint faculty engaged in feminist research spanning multiple disciplines, our department maintains widespread connections and collaborations across the campus and the UC system. Complementary to their work in Gender Studies, our core faculty administer allied units and centers at UCLA, including the Center for the Study of Women/Barbra Streisand Center, the American Indian Studies Center, the Master of Social Sciences Program, the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, the Center on Race & Digital Justice, DataX, and the Racial Violence Hub. We are also excited to announce that as of this year, the LGBTQ Studies Program, directed by our colleague Joshua Guzmán, is now housed within Gender Studies.

Our interdisciplinary curriculum offers students perspectives on the complex interaction of gender, race, class and sexuality in social relations, institutions, and systems around the world. Each year we welcome many transfer students, as well as international and returning students to the Gender Studies major and minor and a select cohort of scholars to the PhD program. We offer multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate degrees that foster critical scholarship from diverse intellectual fields in the humanities and social sciences. The department is deeply committed to social justice as our research and teaching address acute challenges of our time.

Our formation …

The department has grown significantly since its beginning as a Women’s Studies Program in 1975. UCLA established one of the first PhD programs in the field in 1999, implementing a full graduate program and a Concentration. Several generations of our PhD alums now carry forward the research they began here at institutions across the US and the globe. Our name was changed to the Department of Gender Studies in 2012 to better reflect the changes in our research and teaching.

Over the last decade…

The department has continued to expand its interdisciplinary research, attracting new faculty with expertise in approaches to gender and sexuality grounded in transnational, Indigenous, anti-carceral and decolonial feminisms and including experts in disability studies, performance studies, Indigenous rights, migration, queer and trans* studies, labor studies, feminist technology studies, racial and sexual violence, critical data studies, Black feminist philosophy, cultural geography, and affective labor.

Looking forward…

We are excited to welcome to the Gender Studies faculty professors Heather Berg, an expert in sex work and social struggle (in collaboration with the Labor Studies Program) and Christine DeLisle, an expert in indigenous feminisms and Native Pacific Islander histories (in collaboration with the American Indian Studies Department). With the administrative move of UCLA’s LGBTQ Studies minor to our department, we further strengthen our commitment to research and teaching in sexuality studies. Gender Studies looks forward to housing Q-Scholars, an organization for undergraduate students who are interested in conducting LGBTQ-focused research established in 2014, and UCLA’s annual QGrad: Queer Graduate Research Conference, the nation’s longest-established interdisciplinary queer graduate academic conference, now in its 25th year.

As we approach the 2024-25 academic year, we continue to prepare students to become critical feminist thinkers ready and able to confront the challenges of our times.

If you would like to learn more about Gender Studies at UCLA, please explore this website or email us at info@gender.ucla.edu for more information.

Elizabeth Marchant, Chair