Newsletter, Events, and Contact Information

Dear WGSS Alumni and Friends: 

As the days grow shorter and summer comes to an end, I welcome the opportunity to reflect on the past year and share news from our department. I begin this academic year as the new Mary Ellen Heintz Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Granted to the department in 2005, the endowment will support my ongoing community engaged scholarship, student mentorship, and collaborative work. Perhaps even more exciting for me, is the opportunity this award affords us to hire a postdoctoral fellow next year.

Last year was full of ups and downs. For example, we had the pleasure of hosting faculty colleagues from Ohio State, Kenyon College, and University of Louisville to discuss how they are teaching and doing feminist studies today. In a political climate that bans words, legislates gender identity, and criminalizes civil dissent, how we do our work must shift. In a packed room at the Taft Research Center, panelists shared their expansive pedagogical strategies and how they connect with communities beyond the university, including through abolition work, participatory action research, and creative scholarship. On the flip side, we undertook the difficult task of transitioning our major into a subplan in Interdisciplinary Studies (BIS), an outcome of Ohio’s Senate Bill 1. As a BIS subplan, WGSS will continue to offer students a robust interdisciplinary feminist curriculum. I believe that students will still receive the full benefits of a WGSS major. At the same time, I am saddened to see a program that developed out of faculty and administrators’ hard work and political vision be tucked away as part of the corporate capture of the university.

About sixty years ago, students envisioned college as a place for personal growth and development; where they could connect with diverse communities, learn new ideas, and help make the world a better place. Those humanistic ideals have been eroded and today, college is about securing employment. The corporate capture of the university has battered the community-oriented, self-actualizing project of higher education, with little accountability for how this affects the world we live in and hope to leave for future generations. Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies stands in the breach, holding on to these ideals while preparing students to adapt to rapidly changing work conditions, conditions we strive to transform towards labor justice.

Our students stand at the vanguard of these principles. Through their participation in the co-op program, internships at community organizations, creative, and scholarly projects, students affirm their commitment to feminism in the classroom and beyond. A few stand outs worth mentioning: An undergraduate Capstone project examined how queer intimacies are represented in film to assess the evolution of LGBTQ acceptance in the media space. Such feminist media analysis brings to the fore how popular cultural forms such as film both reflect and challenge social norms, including the uneven nature of progress and acceptance; This past summer, our departmental public internship awards supported four graduate students doing work in reproductive justice, violence against women, and LGBTQ youth support services. Our MA/MFA student showed her creative research at DAAP and the Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park. In addition to these accomplishments, this year, we celebrated three undergraduate students’ induction into Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and most prestigious academic honor society in the United States and two graduate students received the Taft Graduate Summer Fellowship to support their MA research. These are only a few accomplishments, but I hope they provide readers with a sense of the broad scope of students’ work and how they advance a feminist mission connected to community and scholarly achievement.

I hope you will visit our department page to learn more about student and faculty accomplishments, and the broad range of activities we host each semester. Please also consider donating to any of our internship funds (Dornette, McLean, Ransohoff, and Sheets) or the Friends of WGSS fund. These funds facilitate student internships, independent projects including Capstones, conference attendance, among other things.

Warmly,

Anima Adjepong, Ph.D. (he/they)

Mary Ellen Heintz Associate Professor and Head of Department

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Dr. Chandra Frank was selected as one of the 2026 Research fellows at the Center for Book Arts in New York. The fellowship includes a short research project and a public presentation. The CBA has a fabulous archive pertaining to the book arts, including many feminist and queer sources, which Dr. Frank will be using to support her second book project.