Contact Graduate Program Assistant, Elaine Haig-Widner, with any general questions about the program or application process. For more specific questions, or to set up an advising appointment, contact Professor Nancy Kenney.

The deadline for applications to the Ph.D. program is December 15th. Currently, we are not accepting any applications for the M.A. program.

Please note that email is the preferred mode of communication, and that we do not return long-distance telephone queries about application procedures.

The Graduate Program in Women Studies at the University of Washington, the first of its kind in the Pacific Northwest, has a strong social science orientation that is relatively unique among graduate programs in this field. (We do not provide training for students interested in emphasizing study in the humanities or language.) Our department's focus is on global and/or transnational feminist analysis of issues pertinent to the lives of women in Asia and in the Americas. Our core faculty specialize in research and scholarship with roots in a variety of social science disciplines including History, Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, and Economics. Many faculty members from departments all around campus hold adjunct appointments in Women Studies and offer courses and consultative expertise to students in our Graduate Program.

We currently admit only those applicants who are interested in working toward the Ph.D. Students working toward the Ph.D. may choose to earn an MA in Women Studies as part of their course of study but we are not admitting students interested in a terminal MA at this time. Because of our desire to work intensively with each of our doctoral students and to fund our students through the majority of their graduate training, admission to the graduate program is highly competitive. We typically admit no more than 3 new students each year.

Students interested in transferring to the Women Studies Ph.D. Program from another graduate program at the University of Washington must apply in the same manner as all other applicants. Admissions are competitive.

Students applying to this program must have a strong academic background in Women, Feminist, Gender, or Cultural Studies and desire to further their education in Women/Feminist Studies with a strong social science perspective. Applicants may have a bachelors or masters degree in any discipline but must have record of academic coursework that includes study of such subjects as feminist theory and/or empirical and/or theoretical analysis of the impact of race, class and gender on society.

Our scholarship draws upon rich and varied histories of feminist thought to push the analytic edge of scholarship foregrounding gender, race and sexuality as integral components of local and global social structures, particularly within the contexts of capitalism, globalization, nationalism and neoliberalism.  We orient around social justice concerns by employing a relational analytics of power, representation and transnational circulation.  We see ourselves as pushing against various disciplinary, institutional and governmentality practices. The sites of our analysis include race/racism, ethnicity and immigration, cultural production and circulation, economic circulation and knowledge constructions, among many others. We draw on interdisciplinary methodologies to facilitate these inquires which are strongly influenced by social sciences but reshaped through the humanities, genealogy, cultural studies and post-structuralism.

The scholarship in our department can be displayed across several overlapping clusters:

1. Gender, sexuality, violence and social justice

2. Transnational perspectives on gender, racism, ethnicity and U.S. ethnic formations

3. Political economy, popular culture and commodity circulation

4. Theorizing power and representation

5. Methodology:  cultural studies, feminist science studies and inquiry

6.Feminist cultural production and public humanities

At the level of doctoral education, the mission of the department of Women Studies is to train scholars in feminist theories and research methodologies with special emphasis on the Americas and Asia. Graduates with doctorates from our department will be innovative thinkers at the vanguard of feminist scholarship who assume leadership positions in the US and international academy or in research and/or policy-making positions.