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Spring 2026 Graduate Courses
[Core Courses]
WST 600 - Feminist Interdisciplinary Histories and Methods
Lisa Diedrich
Tuesdays: 2:00-4:50pm
Rather than beginning with an overview of the history of feminism or the feminist
methodology, this course explores how feminist knowledges both settle and unsettle
understandings of what counts as history, theory, method, and evidence. Since its
emergence as a distinct academic field, feminism(s) have raised questions about how
we know what we know, who gets to speak and for whom, and what constitutes a legitimate
site or object of analysis. What makes research trans,queer, feminist, anti-racist,
decolonial, or transnational? In this course, instructors and students do not seek
definite answers to these questions. Instead, they trace the ways feminist thinkers
intervene in debates about interdisciplinary knowledge production. They examine the
relationship between power and knowledge: the ethics of representation, questions
of accountability, the importance of self- reflexivity, and the recognition of knowledge
production as an embodied and emotional practice. By centering subjects and knowledges
often relegated to academic peripheries, this course challenges the situating of the
west as feminisms epicenter and the racism, coloniality, and cisheteronormativity
often embedded in feminist methods and histories.
WST 610 - Advanced Topics in Women's Studies - "Special Topics in Performance Studies:
Racial Formations in Porn"
Cristina Khan
Wednesdays: 2:00-4:50pm
Racial formations, or the process by which racial categories are produced, inhabited,
and destroyed, was coined by Omi and Winant in the first edition of Racial Formations in the United States in the late 1980s. Both the humanities and social sciences have explored the interarticulate
relationship between race and sexuality across various social sites, including erotic
labor: a broad designation that includes stripping, escorting, and webcam modeling,
among others. This course draws on racial formations as a framework for interrogating
the creation and deployment of racialized categories of identity in web-based pornography.
We explore the socio-political contexts and events that catalyst the development of
contemporary porn site categories, center performance and visual analyses in revealing
how bodies, gestures, and exchanges become marked with racial meaning, and locate
our investigation within a transnational context attentive to the effects of empire,
coloniality, and interlocking systems of oppression.
WST 610 - Advanced Topics in Women's Studies - "Queering Sci-Fi Comics"
Ritch Calvin
Mondays: 2:00-4:50pm
Sequential graphic narratives have had a long—and fraught—history. They have been
deemed a threat to the moral fiber of society; they have been hailed as a new mode
of resistance. In this seminar, we will examine some of that history, develop a vocabulary
to discuss them, and read many post-2010 queer SF comics. We will read works by queer
content creators, works featuring queer characters, and works that queer the SF comic
form. Titles may include Bitch Planet, Decrypting Rita, The Infinite Loop, Kim & Kim, Merry Men, SfSX, Barbalien, Cyclopedia Exotica, Crowded, and Crema.
WST 698 - Practicing Women's and Gender Studies
Nancy Hiemstra
Thursdays: 2:00-4:50pm
This teaching practicum is designed for PhD, MA, and graduate certificate students
in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies who anticipate teaching interdisciplinary
trans, queer, or feminist studies courses. Students will consider the development
and institutionalization of our rich, yet relatively nascent field by taking seriously
the responsibilities we have to recount and challenge white western-centric feminist
genealogies upheld in the Euro-American academy. Together, instructors and students
center feminist pedagogical practices that attend to the imperial and ableist legacies
that underscore mainstream conceptualizations of teaching and learning. They reflect
on how, as educators, their unequal relationships to colonialism, racial capitalism,
and socially constructed identity categories inform their teaching philosophies and
approach to designing courses, syllabuses, and assessments. This course also examines
the changing politics and economics of contemporary academia and how these shifts
impact the production, distribution, and consumption of academic knowledge. Ultimately,
students will uncover the historical implications of women’s, gender, and sexuality
studies and start considering the role they wish to play in mapping the futures of
the field.
Spring 2026 WGSS-Related Electives
(If you see a course not listed here that you think might qualify as a WGSS- related
elective, email the WGSS Graduate Program Director, Professor Angela Jones at angela.n.jones@stonybrook.edu for approval)
MUS 555 - Topics in 20th-Century Music - "Music and the Carceral State"
Kevin Holt
Thursdays 9:40-12:20pm
As theorized by Michel Foucault, the contours of power and discipline within the carceral
system (i.e., the system through which moral and legal standards are enforced through
detention and/or incarceration) permeate all governing social structures, including
those that are not directly implicated as branches of the judicial system. Given that
music is frequently evoked to both comment on and co-create social structures, music
offers a unique frame through which we might explore the notion of the carceral state.
In this course, students will engage with the various ways that music manifests within,
or is used to comment on, the carceral state. This includes, but is not limited to,
music education, production, and performance within the prison system, the criminalization
of certain musicians, genres, and sounds, the use of music as evidence within the
judicial system, policing as a means of controlling how/when music is expressed, and
the use of music/sound as punishment. Students will engage texts from ethnomusicology,
sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, mad studies, and law.
PHI 500 - Feminist Theories - "Feminist Philosophies and Greek Antiquity"
Valentina Moro
Wednesdays 5:00-7:50pm
This seminar explores how feminist studies have engaged with ancient Greek sources.
At times, scholars have returned to these texts to offer historically grounded interpretations;
at others, to question how they have been received and appropriated in the history
of Western philosophy, or even to reread them through the lens of contemporary concerns
rather than those of antiquity. The aim of this course is not to assess the philological
accuracy of these engagements, but to consider how the encounter between feminist
theories and the archive of classical antiquity has been crucial for the history of
Western philosophy itself. Two conceptual threads will guide our reading of the sources:
corporeality and theatricality. The first part of this course introduces key concepts
that are essential for approaching ancient texts. We will take time to unpack the
conceptual vocabulary that shapes these sources. In the following weeks, each session
will focus on a specific Greek tragedy and its reception within feminist theory. We
will read, in translation, several plays alongside major feminist theorists who have
engaged with these works – either implicitly or explicitly. Regarding feminist philosophies,
we will move across a wide range of approaches – from sexual difference to decolonial,
and poststructuralist feminisms. A significant portion of this seminar will be devoted
to identifying and analyzing the different methodologies adopted by these thinkers.
PHI 506 - Art and Its Problems
Anne O'Byrne
Tuesdays 2:00-4:50pm
A consideration of basic problems in the creation and appreciation of art. What is
the creative process? Who is the artist? How is art to be compared with other symbolic
forms (e.g. language, science, technology)? What does art offer that philosophy does
not, and vice-versa? In what ways does the gender or racial identity of the artist
affect the creation of the work? What are the cultural, social, and political dimensions
of the art work and its reception?
SOC 512 - Global Sociology, Identities and Organizations in Global Perspective
Daniel Levy
Wednesdays 2:00-4:50pm
This course examines how increasing global integration impacts human societies. It
reviews the broad trends that foster globalization in the economic, political, cultural,
and social spheres, as well as the consequences global change has had on how individuals
and communities identify themselves and how they organize for collective goals. Core
issues on the global agenda such as conflict, environment, technological and economic
development, demographic change, gender, and human rights will be addressed; research
methods for the study of global society will be introduced.
SOC 591 - Special Seminars - "Social Movements and Collective Behavior"
Manisha Desai
Mondays 2:00-4:50pm
Protests and social movements are no longer confined to a single nation-state but
transcend borders just as the issues they challenge -- climate change, gender inequality,
and racism, immigration among others -- also affect people across the planet. But
such global protests are not a new phenomenon of the 21 st or even the 20 th century. The globalization of social
movement as a social form and legitimate politics dates to the 18 th century even
as protests themselves were present throughout human history.
In this course we will examine the globalization of social movement as a social form
in the 19th century and then explore various global social movements of the 18th,
19th, 20th, and 21st century with the aim of understanding how the shifting global
political economy and means of communication and technology play a role in the emergence of global social movements
their strategies and outcomes. Relatedly, we will also explore how these movement
dynamics shape social movement theories and praxis.
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