About

The Women's and Gender Studies Department at DePaul University is a vibrant, active and engaged community of faculty, students, staff and alumni. We offer an array of interdisciplinary courses and programs that explore issues, perspectives, policies, and social change efforts through a feminist lens that understands the interconnections between people's identities, cultures, histories, geographies, and social locations in the context of broader systems of power.

By crossing the boundaries of traditional fields of study, Women's and Gender Studies seeks to contribute new, coherent understandings of human experiences. We offer critical analyses, reflections, and contributions to knowledge in ways that contribute to our understanding of power, resistance, and social transformation. As a result, our faculty, students and alums contribute to social change efforts inside and outside of the academy. 

The WGS DePaul faculty contributes to cutting-edge scholarship that contributes to a changing world. Our scholarship is interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational. For each faculty member, this means we draw from different feminist genealogies and traditions that attend to how people's experiences are differentially impacted by interlocking systems of oppression and power, including patriarchy, heteronormativity, racism, white supremacy, ableism, colonialism, imperialism, global capitalism, neoliberalism, and more. 

Faculty scholarship and community-based work guides and informs our core WGS curricular offerings and elective courses reflecting our faculty's expertise and knowledge. In addition to our WGS courses, students can take elective courses offered by affiliated feminist scholars in departments across the university to fulfill their undergraduate and graduate programs. This means that students can build relationships and knowledge from scholars, writers, artists, and educators based in WGS as well as other departments and programs as they are developing their particular focus and direction that will shape their post-graduate work. 

Alumni from DePaul's WGS undergraduate and graduate programs find work in and/or pursue further education in a wide variety of fields, including education, social services, the arts, writing and publishing, la​​​w, health sciences and policy, public policy, business, among other areas. 

The Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul University offers an undergraduate major and minor, a Five Year BA/MA Program, a Master of Arts (MA) Graduate Program, a joint MSW/MA in Women’s and Gender Studies program, and a four-course Graduate Certificate Program.