ASU PhD in Gender Studies

transcend boundaries transcend

disciplines transform the

world

PhD in Gender Studies

An academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Designed for the challenges of our time American society and the world’s challenges have shifted dramatically over the last 50 years, but many universities have hardly changed at all.

At Arizona State University, we’re challenging the very definition of what a university can be. By transcending traditional academic boundaries, fusing new intellectual connections, embracing complexity, and embedding our work in community partnerships, we’re radically redesigning higher learning to prepare graduates to succeed in today’s world and create research that is relevant for our time.

For doctoral students and scholars determined to challenge the boundaries of intellect, it is difficult to imagine a more exciting place to be.

Achieving Research I status from the Carnegie Foundation in 1994, ASU today is the nation’s largest public research university, with four campuses in metropolitan Phoenix. Its research expenditures are in the top 20 among universities without a medical school.

Phoenix is one of the fastest growing and most rapidly diversifying metro regions in the United States and is an emerging global city.

The doctoral program in gender studies draws on ASU’s historically strong Women and Gender Studies program. One of the largest and most vibrant in the nation, its core faculty is an intellectually and culturally diverse community with expertise in sexuality, labor, race, science and technology, health, visual culture, violence, globalization, historical and literary narrative, queer and transgender studies, and social change.

As a doctoral student in gender studies you’ll pursue your course work and research from a platform of novel collaboration and cross-pollination. You’ll take core and elective courses offered in Women and Gender Studies and can also choose from electives offered by more than 100 affiliated faculty across ASU. With few required courses among the 84 units required for the degree, you’ll have tremendous flexibility to build a program that suits your research interests and professional goals.

Our faculty expertise covers the following areas linked through transdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives:

The School of Social Transformation in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is an integral part of ASU’s vision for a New American University—a university guided by a “build what you need, not what’s always been done” attitude.

• health and sexuality • gender, science and technology • gender, justice and social change • visual and narrative culture • girlhood and adolescence

One of many new transdisciplinary schools recently established at ASU, the School enjoys the institutional talent and support to pursue discovery and social innovation in novel ways. It brings together scholars, students, and communities in women and gender studies; African and African American studies; Asian Pacific American studies; justice and social inquiry; and culture, society and education to create new knowledge that challenges conventional thinking and transforms the world.

You may take courses across the foci areas. In fact, our doctoral students’ research pursuits often overlap two foci, making their work and experience more robust and relevant to societal challenges.

Gende

Theory

As you form your graduate committee, you’ll be able to draw on a graduate faculty of some 50 professors whose teaching, scholarship, and mentoring interests have earned them a place on the gender studies graduate faculty.

Feminist

Identity Sexua Interrelationship Theory Doctorate Race Society Class Culture Ideologies Feminist Power

Narrative

Id

Girlhoo

Discou

Media Gender Comparative Girlhood Women Visual Discourse Sexuality Justice

Changemakers in progress...

Corie Hardy

13 core faculty 50+ graduate faculty

in disciplines across ASU

Professional Development Your mentoring in the School will include involvement in professional development seminars and courses in Writing for Publication and Dissertation Writing Support.

If your ultimate goal is a professorial career, you will be encouraged to participate as well in ASU’s outstanding Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program graduate.asu. edu/pff after your first year of doctoral study.

The assistance of the School of Social Transformation’s research advancement specialist is available to doctoral students seeking external research funding. ASU’s Graduate and Professional Student Association offers competitive research grants and travel funding support for off-site research and participation in conferences and meetings, asu.edu/gpsa/funding.

Doctoral student B.A., English, B.A., women’s studies Old Dominion University

“In my dissertation project, ‘Interracial Intimacies in the PostRacial Imaginary,’ I’m examining popular representations of and cultural responses to interracial intimacy in an allegedly post-racial United States. Although my focus is largely contemporary, I also highlight the historical trajectories of interracial images in American popular culture.”

Elena Frank

Doctoral student B.A., psychology, gender & sexuality studies New York University

“My dissertation looks at the cultural silence around women and masturbation (and its disruptions), and the ways that female masturbation has been given individual and social meaning, in order to develop an understanding of the ways that gender, power, and pleasure converge to influence women’s lives. I consider the broader implications of these discourses, ideologies, and lived experiences for understandings of sexual subjectivity, agency, pleasure, and health.”

Financial Support You’ll find a number of opportunities for financial and professional support. Each year we aim to admit the number of doctoral students who can be fully funded with graduate fellowships and teaching and research assistantships (typically four or five). These awards cover your tuition, health insurance, and also carry a stipend.

As doctoral students near the final stages of their program, they apply for competitive Dissertation Completion Fellowships from ASU Graduate Education, semester-long funding that allows students to focus on the dissertation.

Our fall 2013 doctoral class includes (clockwise from left) Sakena Young-Scaggs, Kellie Herson, Aarushi Sharma, and Michelle Spiegel, who bring to the program backgrounds in religion and political science, women’s studies, English, and education and women’s studies, respectively.

Recent Alumni Debjani Chakravarty ’13 Ph.D. M.A. in sociology, University of Pune Assistant professor, Women and Gender Studies, Grand Valley State University

“My research interests span transnational feminism, gender and citizenship, feminist jurisprudence, feminist epistemology, and cyberfeminism, and my dissertation interrogated the discourse on transnational feminisms in India and the United States.

Feminist, post-colonial and critical neo-Marxian theories inform the work—as did my experiences as a journalist and social worker in India and my hybrid social location as a feminist academic in spaces of intellectual/social engagements in the Global South and Global North.”

Charlie Zhang ’13 Ph.D.

M.A. in communication, Fudan University Assistant professor and director, Global Studies, South Dakota State University

“My research interests include critical theory of gender and race, intersectionality, transnational feminism, and masculinity studies.

I’m particularly interested in exploring culture as a site of resistance and social justice. In my dissertation, I examined why and how the discourse of gender becomes one of the foundational terrains to construct new Chineseness—and disrupts the social crises in other fields, such as class and ethnicity— after the neoliberal governmentality was introduced into China by Deng Xiaoping.”

Start your application at:

graduate.asu.edu/admissions

Core Graduate Faculty Aren Aizura, Assistant Professor

Queer theory, gender and transgender studies, scientific understandings of gender/sexuality, labor and political economy, transnationality, racialization

Lisa M. Anderson, Associate Professor and Director,

Graduate Program in Gender Studies Semiotics; intersections of race, gender and sexuality; and black LGBT studies

Alesha Durfee, Associate Professor Domestic violence and the justice system, mandatory arrest policies for domestic violence, child care utilization and policy

Mary Margaret Fonow, Professor and Director, School of Social Transformation Feminism and transnational labor activism, feminist political economy, human rights, and feminist methodology

Georganne Scheiner Gillis, Associate Professor and Faculty Head, Women and Gender Studies History of American women and feminism; girlhood and adolescence; women in popular culture; gender, sexuality and the media

Yasmina Katsulis, Associate Professor Structural determinants of gender and sexual health disparities, particularly among at-risk youth

Sally Kitch, Regents’ Professor and Director, Institute for Humanities Research Feminist theory and epistemology, theories of interdisciplinarity, gender in visual and narrative culture, history of gender and race

Ann Hibner Koblitz, Professor Relationships of gender with science, medicine, and technology, gender and archaeology, and comparative aspects of women and gender in science, technology and medicine

Karen J. Leong, Associate Professor Discourses of gender, race, class and nation, and how they’ve shaped U.S. society; gender ideologies; racial identity formation, immigration policy and the formation of national identities

Kimberly Scott, Associate Professor and Executive Director, COMPUGIRLS Gender, education, and social change; adolescent girls & technology; digital equity, intersectionality, and culturally responsive computing

In addition to meeting all ASU Graduate Education admission requirements, successful applicants will:

Heather Switzer, Assistant Professor

• • • • • •

Sujey Vega, Assistant Professor

hold a bachelor’s or master’s degree have completed four gender-related courses provide a resume or curriculum vitae write a statement of purpose submit a 10-25 page writing sample provide three letters of reference from faculty or researchers

Priority deadline for application is January 7.

Learn more about Arizona State University’s doctoral degree in gender studies at: sst.asu.edu/gender-studies-phd or contact Dr. Lisa Anderson, graduate program director, at lmanderson@asu.edu or (480) 965-8597.

Gender and international development, critical globalization studies, African feminist and gender theory, constructions of girls and girlhood in sub-Saharan Africa Gender, race, ethnicity, class and the concept of belonging; Chicana/ Latina lives; Latina/o communities; gender and the immigrant experience; religion; discourse; space/place; transnationalism

Rose Weitz, Professor Women, health, and the body; midlife Women’s sexuality and its portrayal in the media; the interrelationship between power and stigma, identity, health or illness, and healthcare

View a directory of all graduate faculty for the doctorate at: graduate.asu.edu/graduate_faculty/degree/LAGSTPHD

Join us. And pursue the work you believe in.