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EIU Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies



Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is an area of study based on the understanding that gender is a fundamental category of social and cultural analysis.

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies aims to:

  • Focus on gender as a fundamental category of social and cultural analysis;
  • Promote new scholarship in the field, including work on women, gender, sexuality and other social categories, including race, socioeconomic status and nationality;
  • Encourage traditional departments to broaden their fields of study to include gender as a category of analysis;
  • Highlight the necessity of considering race, socioeconomic status, sexual identity, nationality, and other social categories, particularly as these intersect with gender;
  • Engage with a variety of academic disciplines, including the arts, humanities, education, social sciences, sciences and technology.

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Why Choose EIU

Awareness

Informed by recent scholarship on gender and sexuality, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor is an eighteen-hour interdisciplinary program designed to offer students a rich, diverse understanding of human behavior, culture, and society through the investigation of women’s experiences.

HOPE

Angie Hunt of HOPE leads WST 2903, “Women, Gender, and Violence". This course fulfills the 40 hour training requirements for work in domestic violence services and sexual assault service in the State of Illinois

Empowerment

EIU FEM is a student organization that fosters student development, raises awareness, provides knowledge, and promotes activism in regards to gender related issues through organized discussions and events. One of the goals of this organization is to facilitate a more diverse campus.

WHAM

Each year in March, the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at Eastern Illinois University hosts one of the biggest annual events on campus, Women's History and Awareness Month (WHAM). Events include featured speakers, the Central Illinois Feminist Film Festival, and Award Ceremony. Check out our Facebook Page for details about upcoming events.

Community

The Living History Project is sponsored by the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and is currently in its twenty-fifth year. Each year the Living History Program recruits students to portray women in history at local elementary schools during Women's History and Awareness Month in March. Students are asked to research a woman of their choice, develop a 10-minute monologue, and help devise a costume. They may earn one credit hour if they choose but many students participate just for the experience.



Meet our Faculty

Julie Campbell

English

Dr. Campbell's areas of teaching and research are Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature with specialization in the works of continental and English women writers. She is the author of Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2006) and the editor and translator of Isabella Andreini’s pastoral tragicomedy, La Mirtilla (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2002).

Melinda Mueller

Political Science

Dr. Mueller teaches two graduate seminars--the proseminar on American Politics and the seminar on Congress and the Presidency. At the undergraduate level, she teaches Women and Politics, the Presidency, Interest Groups and Lobbying, Environmental Politics and Policy, Introduction to Political Science Research, and the Political Science capstone. She regularly directs undergraduate and graduate independent studies and theses in the area of congressional politics, public policy, interest groups, and women and politics.

Michael Gillespie

Sociology

Dr. Gillespie has the distinguished honor to teach the required applied statistics course in the Department of Sociology/Anthropology. This course, for which students most often only enroll because it is a program requirement, is therefore met with much anxiety and skepticism by Sociology majors. However, integrating statistical literacy with a pirate, props, M&M chocolate candies, and real world applications, Dr. Gillespie develops for his students a critical eye toward social statistics that, in hopes, lives and breathes outside of the classroom.

Related Pages

Amelia Daddazio Fund

Contact Information

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program

Eastern Illinois University
600 Lincoln Avenue
Charleston, IL 61920- 3099
jludlow@eiu.edu


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