Women's and Gender Studies
The Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender (ISSG) is the locus of interdisciplinary feminist and queer scholarship and teaching at Columbia University. Offering an undergraduate degree program and graduate certification in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Institute draws its core and affiliated faculty from a diverse array of disciplines across Columbia University and Barnard College. ISSG provides rigorous training in interdisciplinary scholarly, pedagogical, and activist practice and prepares students for professional work or advanced academic study.
For questions about specific courses, contact the department.
For questions about specific courses, contact the department.
Courses
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course introduces students to key concepts and texts in environmental humanities, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, sexuality, capital, nation, and globalization. The course examines the conceptual foundations that support humanistic analyses of environmental issues, climate crisis, and the ethics of justice and care. In turn, this critical analysis can serve as the basis for responding to the urgency of calls for environmental action.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Students will learn what difference humanistic studies make to understanding environmental issues and climate crisis. The course will prepare students to:
- Identify humanistic methods and how they contribute to understanding the world;
- Demonstrate critical approaches to reading and representing environments;
- Engage ethical questions related to the environment; and
- Apply concepts from the course to synthesize the student’s use of humanistic approaches to address urgent environmental questions.
Course Number
WMST1006X001Points
3 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Mo 10:10-11:25We 10:10-11:25Section/Call Number
001/00060Enrollment
28 of 30Instructor
Ashley DawsonDiscussion Section
Course Number
WMST1007X001Points
0 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
We 10:10-11:25Section/Call Number
001/00062Enrollment
0 of 35This course examines the conceptual foundations that support feminist and queer analyses of racial capitalism, security and incarceration, the politics of life and health, and colonial and postcolonial studies, among others. Open to all students; required for the major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE).
Course Number
WMST2140X001Points
3 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Tu 14:40-15:55Th 14:40-15:55Section/Call Number
001/00045Enrollment
0 of 50Instructor
Marisa SolomonCourse Number
WMST2141X001Points
0 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Th 14:40-15:55Section/Call Number
001/00046Enrollment
0 of 30Instructor
Samuel DavisEnrollment for this class is by instructor approval and an application is required. Please fill out the form here: https://forms.gle/bPsV7rcf5RWB35PM9
This introductory course for the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE) as well as Majors/Minors in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) is open to all students. We focus on the critical study of social difference as an interdisciplinary practice, using texts with diverse modes of argumentation and evidence to analyze social differences as fundamentally entangled and co-produced. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, the professor will frequently be joined by other faculty and guest speakers who bring distinct disciplinary and subject matter expertise. Some keywords for this course include hybridity, diaspora, borderlands, migration, and intersectionality.
Course Number
WMST2150X001Format
In-PersonPoints
3 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Tu 10:10-11:25Th 10:10-11:25Section/Call Number
001/00057Enrollment
19 of 45N/A
Course Number
WMST2151X001Points
0 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Th 10:10-11:25Section/Call Number
001/00058Enrollment
0 of 30Some of the central questions in the study of environmental humanities focus on human action, its context, and its effects. Thus, one major contribution of the environmental humanities is to study and consider how we conceptualize action, relations (both between humans and environments and among humans), and even the meaning of human being. The environmental humanities places these conceptual questions in the context of value and values, as well as questions of how values are materialized in practice. This course considers all of these questions through the study both theories of action in the context of environmental humanities and research into existing projects that are informed by and can inform the study of environmental humanities.
Course Number
WMST3145X001Points
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
We 12:10-14:00Section/Call Number
001/00970Enrollment
0 of 25Instructor
Janet JakobsenPrerequisites: LIMITED TO 20 BY INSTRUC PERM; ATTEND FIRST CLASS
This course provides a theoretical itinerary to the emergence of contemporary queer theory and engagement with some contemporary legacies of the movement. The goal is not to be exhaustive nor to establish a correct history of queer theory but to engage students in the task of understanding and creating intellectual genealogies.
Course Number
WMST3311V001Format
In-PersonPoints
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Th 16:10-18:00Section/Call Number
001/00158Enrollment
0 of 15Instructor
Marisa SolomonLove and sex have long been studied as historical constructs influenced by social, political, and economic dimensions. This course aims to expand this discourse by incorporating the often-overlooked lens of technological mediation. Beginning with the premise that romantic love is deeply shaped by the affordances of the technology of the time, a critical awareness of technological mediation in romance –especially of digital technologies, i.e. online dating, social media, or cybersex— allows for a deeper understanding of how social categories such as gender, race, class, ability, or sexuality are technologically-mediated, thereby informing our societal and cultural perceptions of love, dating, and sex.
Sandra Moyano-Ariza is Term Assistant Professor of WGSS and Research Director at BCRW. Her research works at the intersection of pop culture, philosophy, and digital technologies, with interests in the fields of media studies and digital scholarship, contemporary feminist theory, critical race theory, posthumanism, and affect theory.
Course Number
WMST3504X001Points
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
We 14:10-16:00Section/Call Number
001/00978Enrollment
13 of 15Instructor
Sandra Moyano-ArizaComparative study of gender, race, and sexuality through specific historical, socio-cultural contexts in which these systems of power have operated. With a focus on social contexts of slavery, colonialism, and modern capitalism for the elaboration of sex-gender categories and systems across historical time.
Course Number
WMST3514X001Format
In-PersonPoints
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Tu 12:10-14:00Section/Call Number
001/00744Enrollment
20 of 20Course Number
WMST3521V001Format
In-PersonPoints
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Tu 16:10-18:00Section/Call Number
001/10131Enrollment
0 of 10Instructor
Elizabeth PovinelliStudent-designed capstone research projects offer practical lessons about how knowledge is produced, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the application of interdisciplinary feminist methodologies.
Course Number
WMST3525V001Points
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Th 10:10-12:00Section/Call Number
001/00162Enrollment
9 of 9Instructor
Manijeh MoradianStudent-designed capstone research projects offer practical lessons about how knowledge is produced, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the application of interdisciplinary feminist methodologies.
Course Number
WMST3525V002Points
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Th 14:10-16:00Section/Call Number
002/00163Enrollment
5 of 8Instructor
Alexander PittmanThis course considers formations of gender, sexuality, and power as they circulate transnationally, as well as transnational feminist and queer movements that have emerged to address contemporary gendered and sexual inequalities. Topics include political economy, global care chains, sexuality, sex work and trafficking, feminist and queer politics, and human rights. If it is a small world after all, how do forces of globalization shape and redefine the relationship between gender, sexuality, and powerful institutions like the state? And, if power swirls everywhere, how are transnational power dynamics reinscribed in gendered bodies? How is the body represented in discussions of nationalism and in the political economy of globalization? These questions will frame this course by highlighting how gender, sexuality, and power coalesce to impact the lives of individuals in various spaces including workplaces, the academy, the home, religious institutions, the government, and civil society, and human rights organizations. This course will enable us to think transnationally, historically, and dynamically, using gender and sexuality as lenses through which to critique relations of power and the ways that power informs our everyday lives and subjectivities.
Course Number
WMST3915W001Format
In-PersonPoints
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
We 14:10-16:00Section/Call Number
001/10045Enrollment
0 of 15Instructor
Tara GonsalvesINDEPENDENT STUDY
Course Number
WMST3999X001Points
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Mo 13:10-14:25We 13:10-14:25Section/Call Number
001/00080Enrollment
0 of 60Instructor
Rebecca Jordan-YoungGenealogies of Feminism: Course focuses on the development of a particular topic or issue in feminist, queer, and/or WGSS scholarship. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates, though priority will be given to students completing the ISSG graduate certificate. Topics differ by semester offered, and are reflected in the course subtitle. For a description of the current offering, please visit the link in the Class Notes.
Course Number
WMST4000G001Points
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Tu 14:10-16:00Section/Call Number
001/10132Enrollment
7 of 12Instructor
Julia Bryan-WilsonConnecting cultural and social issues to ethical questions, this course in feminist and critical interdisciplinary studies offers students the opportunity to consider the relationship between values and value in different modes of living. All too often in public discourse ethical values are invoked but not clearly articulated in terms of their meaning, parameters, and relation to each other. This research seminar investigates values through a semester-long consideration of a single overarching question. This version of the course focuses on the environmental humanities, but other instantiations may use this method to consider different issues. Here, the values commonly invoked in public discussions of the environment are considered in relation to each other, placed in larger analytic contexts, and applied. The final section of the course brings the study of values together with a study of major environmental issues, with a focus on inter-relations amongst those issues. The course uses these interdisciplinary and critical approaches that have become central to feminist ethics as the basis for students developing a major semester-long research project on a question of their own choosing.
Course Number
WMST4100W001Points
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
We 14:10-16:00Section/Call Number
001/00971Enrollment
0 of 20Instructor
Janet JakobsenThis advanced seminar examines historical, social, cultural, and theoretical propositions for decolonizing praxis and their complex relations to feminist critique. How do we understand Western European colonialism and coloniality as modes, conditions, and institutions of power, dispossession, subjugation, and subjection continuing into the present? What are the methods, practices, and vision enacted and proposed by the colonized for undoing and radically transforming the determinate logics, instruments, and structures of colonialism as these persist in the present moment? We will consider how gender and sexuality as well as race – as technologies of social organization, codes of valuation, and modes of survival – shape colonialism and the struggles against it. We will inquire into their significance to projects of decolonization. How might decolonization envision and make possible other ways of life?
Course Number
WMST4305W001Format
In-PersonPoints
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
We 11:10-13:00Section/Call Number
001/00223Enrollment
18 of 18Instructor
Neferti TadiarThis advanced seminar examines important approaches, issues, perspectives, and themes related to planetary concerns of environmental crisis, climate change, life sustainability, and multi-species flourishing, with a focus on feminist, postcolonial, anti-racist, and queer perspectives. Topics for discussion and study include the global pandemic, histories of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism,
Prereqs: BOTH 1 WMST Intro course PLUS any WGSS 'Foundation' course, OR instructor permission.
Course Number
WMST4322W001Format
In-PersonPoints
4 ptsFall 2025
Times/Location
Th 12:10-14:00Section/Call Number
001/01019Enrollment
0 of 18Instructor
Neferti TadiarTheoretical Paradigms in Feminist Scholarship: Course focuses on the current theoretical debates of a particular topic or issue in feminist, queer, and/or WGSS scholarship. Open to graduate students, with preference given to students completing the ISSG graduate certificate. Topics differ by semester offered, and are reflected in the course subtitle. For a description of the current offering, please visit the link in the Class Notes.