WGS at NYU today
Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) / 1999
After seeing the CAS program name change from “Women’s Studies” to “Gender and Sexuality Studies” in the early 2000s, I needed to know more about that time period at NYU, which led me to learning about the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. My interviewee Anne Green worked for the CAS program in the nineties, and she spoke to me about how NYU recruited many high-powered faculty as the institution grew in stature. This growth included a movement to launch the CSGS, where the Women’s Studies program would be situated. She said, “Maybe folks were recognizing that Women's Studies was sort of an orphan and underfunded. My understanding of [the CSGS] at the time was that it would bring in that broader aperture for the undergraduate [Women’s Studies] program.”
Figure 1. About page from the CSGS’s website.
Click here to see the CSGS’s Mission and Activities and Initiatives flier from Spring 2003.
The CSGS was founded in 1999 by Department of English Professor Carolyn Dinshaw, who directed both the Center and undergraduate WGS program from 1999-2005. I looked through the archived newsletters from the early years of CSGS and found interviews with Gender and Sexuality Studies (GSS) students, profiles of faculty, reviews of CSGS events and talks, announcements of new feminist student organizations, and a Director’s letter in each one. In her spring 2003 letter, Dinshaw wrote about the Women’s Studies program changing its name in the prior year, which occurred “without a breath of controversy.” Dinshaw posits the program was able to make that change so easily because it was created in 1988, almost two decades after the first WGS programs at San Diego State University and the University of Washington, which were founded in 1970. Dinshaw wrote, “Our program is simply not as entrenched as it might be elsewhere, and as a consequence is more flexible and less resistant to change” (2003).
Click here to read the full From the Director letter from the Spring 2003 issue.
The 2003 CSGS newsletter announced another change: a new Associate Director: Professor of Sociology Lynne Haney, who was in the role from 2001 to 2005, and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the GSS program from 2002-2004. During her time, Haney worked on a graduate certificate in GSS. I spoke to her in November 2023 to learn more about her time there, and whatever happened with that certificate program!
Figure 2. Excerpt from “New Associate Director Arrives at CSGS” by Ailsa Craig in the Spring 2003 newsletter.
Haney told me about how the CSGS was Carolyn Dinshaw’s endeavor “to do two things that were unique and original.” The first was the idea to merge gender and sexuality, to which she said, “Now that was not always the easiest thing to combine; some of us were studying gender intersectionally, many were just studying sexuality. But I think everyone thought it was conceptually innovative and institutionally, really innovative.” The second was consciously linking the social sciences and the humanities, which was critical because at that point, most gender studies centers were humanities focused. As a sociologist, Haney was able to bring a different perspective to create dialogues between the two disciplines. She said, “[Dinshaw] sought me out for that reason, literally because I was a social scientist. And that was what our partnership was like: how do we think about these things in social scientific terms and in humanistic terms?”
Figure 3. Brief about the Keywords series in the Spring 2004 newsletter. Haney called the series, which ran for two years, “one of [her] favorite things that has happened at NYU.” She said, “We would have workshops where social scientists and humanities folks come and reflect on how a specific concept emerges in their fields. And they were so productive. You really got a sense of the differences in how you approach gender and sexuality if you're a social scientist versus a humanities person. It was just incredibly generative, these discussions we were having.”
The Keywords workshops also showed the CSGS staff the need to train NYU graduate students in WGS studies. Haney told me, “It was these Keywords meetings where we were learning so much in talking across areas that we thought we needed to be training our graduate students in that, too.” Personally, I was very surprised to see a mention of an advanced certificate in GSS in the newsletter. I was curious to know more about it as a current graduate student, and Haney was the perfect person to talk with. She told me that the undergraduate GSS program was “alive and thriving, but there was nothing for graduate students.” The high numbers of graduate students who would come to CSGS programming and speak about the lack of space for them in WGS made the need for a certificate clear to Haney. However, before it was ever offered, the GSS program underwent another change that would make a certificate redundant. The program joined a full Department, complete with graduate course offerings. On the certificate, Haney said,
We were all ready to go on this. We came up with the syllabi. We met with people from all over the country in other grad programs. And we had the whole curriculum structure. Students who got the certificate were going to be taking grad courses in both humanities and social sciences, so that they got a sense of what the study of gender and sexuality looked like in these two areas. We had all the materials ready to go and the graduate dean, Catharine Stimpson–who was like the mother of gender studies–was super supportive of this. And then SCA develops.
Social and Cultural Analysis (SCA) / 2005
Figure 4. SCA’s first appearance in the CAS bulletin in 2006-2008.
Social and Cultural Analysis SCA was a new interdisciplinary Department at NYU CAS established on September 1, 2005. The SCA department houses Gender and Sexuality Studies, Ethnic Studies (Africana, American, Asian/Pacific, Latino) and Metropolitan Studies. In a video on the SCA website About page, former chair Dr. Joan Morgan says:
Each of these programs are linked to social movements of the 1960s and 70s for equity, justice and inclusion that have shaped these areas of academic scholarship...We need these programs. We have not folded the programs into the department to weaken them. They represent chronically underserved areas of research and pedagogy and we protect and honor them as such. But we come together as a department because we see these areas as requiring intersectional modes of inquiry to sustain them.
In the Spring 2004 CSGS newsletter, Dinshaw’s From the Director letter mentions the intensive discussions with the Faculty of Arts and Science Deans that led to a proposal for the SCA department.
Click here to read the full From the Director letter from the Spring 2004 issue.
I spoke to Lynne Haney about the development of SCA and she said that while the faculty felt like the administration wanted to condense their programs, without departmental status they couldn’t hire faculty on their own. She said, “It was a fascinating administrative move. The promise with creating SCA was that it would be a department that could hire people without going into Politics, Sociology, English, History. And that's why everybody went for it.” While reflecting on the time, Haney told me that she wasn’t completely supportive of GSS going into that larger network, saying:
There was a big debate, and I was on the side where I thought [GSS] could stand alone, and I thought it should stand alone. I think SCA is an incredible department, but I actually thought we could have. There are absolute benefits for it, my hunch is that SCA students take a gender class and they're like, Whoa, this is amazing. I do think that that's a giant benefit. I think the loss for me, from looking from a distance, is that it kind of doesn't have as much of a power to be self-sustaining, or a self standing identity. It just doesn't feel like its own force anymore.
Figure 5. I took this picture of the SCA department offices in December 2023.
Interestingly, most of the archival files I found about SCA were in the Records of the Asian/Pacific/American (A/P/A) Institute, which was formed in 1996. There I found records from 2004 when the department being proposed was called “Transnational and Intercultural Studies.” There were student essays, letters from alumni, articles, and more depicting resistance to the combining of the various programs. I got an inside look into the concerns students had with the impending department transition: that the A/P/A program would lose valuable resources including faculty and staff and their Institute’s space, or that it would halt the creation of an A/P/A major, because the at that time only a minor option was available (Wu, 2004, p. 5). As a former student activist, I recognized the desire to voice your worries about administrative choices that seem out of your hands, to raise consciousness amongst your allies. While the students knew that the transition would definitely occur, they stated their demands eloquently and publicly, and someone thought to preserve them in the Archives. I’m so curious to know what others thought, but this was the only place I could easily find that perspective.
Today, what remains is the Gender and Sexuality Studies (GSS) program in the SCA department. It is an undergraduate program that offers a major and a minor. In the spring 2005 CSGS newsletter, Dinshaw attempted to answer frequently asked questions before the program was formalized that fall. Currently, majors are required to take two introductory courses and six electives, four of which must be taught by SCA faculty. In spring 2024 as I finish this project, the offered electives include Queer Histories, Latina Feminist Studies, and Sex, Gender, and Language.
Figure 6. “From the Director: GSS FAQs” by Carolyn Dinshaw in the Spring 2005 CSGS newsletter.
Conclusion / 2024
That concludes my project on the history of WGS at NYU! I had so much fun and learned so much during this project. It truly prepared me to be a better higher education administrator and gave me an understanding of the importance of being an agent of history as a student and educator/administrator. I want to thank my instructors Professor James Fraser and University Archivist Janet Bunde, my classmates in HSED.GE2109, the staff in the NYU Bobst Library including in Special Collections and Research Archives, Digital Scholarship Services and everyone I spoke to via Zoom and email for the interviews. Please send any questions or comments to zeg2011@nyu.edu.
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References
Center for Gender and Sexuality, 2002-2003; New York University Archives Collection of Publications and Ephemera; MC.334; Box 163; New York University Archives, New York University.
Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. (2022). https://csgsnyu.org/
New York University. (2002). New York University Bulletin 2002-2004 College of Arts & Science. https://cas.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/casBulletin/documents/bulletin0204.pdf
NYU Arts & Science. Gender and Sexuality Studies. https://as.nyu.edu/departments/genderandsexuality.html
NYU Arts & Science. Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. https://as.nyu.edu/departments/sca.html
Records of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, 2004-2009; New York University Archives Collection of Publications and Ephemera; MC.334; Box 12; New York University Archives, New York University.