Welcome to WGS!
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is an interdisciplinary program with contributions from faculty across campus and beyond. Our alumni are employed in social service work, health services occupations, business, law, education, and government at all levels.
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is also an excellent second major or minor for students in a wide variety of disciplines, such as anthropology, biology, mathematics and statistics, nursing, political science, psychology, political science, sociology, English, social work, and history.
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies students gain a more complete understanding of how the social construction of gender has influenced the roles, contributions, and experiences of both women and men in many different cultures, now and in the past. Such awareness can help them better understand our contemporary world with its changing roles for all.
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies helps orient students to:
• better understand our contemporary world with its changing roles for all;
• appreciate the complexity of how gender interacts with race, social class, sexual orientation, and other forms of diversity;
• draw connections between Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and other disciplines across the university;
• appreciate how scholarship in WGS Studies informs activism and social change, historically and in the present;
• develop the critical intellectual capacity and communication skills to work with, value, and improve the lives of others in whatever public or private spheres they choose.
WE HAVE MOVED TO 204 WILLIAMS HALL
APPLY NOW! for 2025/2026 Constance “Connie” Fournier Student Travel Award
This award supports travel and/or professional experiences for undergraduate or graduate students whose research, scholarship, or creative/professional work incorporates feminist methods or perspectives or address issues of equity and justice.
The award provides up to $600 in travel expenses for conferences or other professional events to be attended in the 2025/2026 academic year and is funded by a donation from the late Constance “Connie” Fournier, a world traveler and educator with a passion for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
All UMaine students are eligible to apply
Applications should be sent to:
Include the following:
- Student name and program of study
- Name and place/date of conference or professional event that the student plans to attend.
- Title of presentation and/or role that student will take at the event.
- Itemized list of expenses to be covered by the award
- A short description (250-350 words) including:
- the student’s work or research, and what makes it a good fit for this award.
- what the student hopes to gain from the conference or professional event(for example the research involved for a presentation, or the professional/educational opportunities that the conference or event will provide for the student.
Proposals are due by December 1, 2025. If no award is granted, proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis through the spring semester, or until the award is granted
Become the next WGS intern!
WGS @ Work Series
Come see what Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program has to offer with our “WGS @ Work Series”
Spring 2025
The WGS at Work Series Presents
Women, fiction, and Peru: Karina Pacheco
Monday, November 10, 10:00 – 11:00,
Bangor Room in the Memorial Union
Speaker: Peruvian author Karina Pacheco
Coffee and light snacks provided!
UMaine graduate and Peruvian author Karina Pacheco discusses her new book, The Year of the Wind (Greywolf Press). Pacheco, who writes about the struggle of Peruvian women, the Peruvian Army Conflict, and its consequences, reflects on her fiction as both a creative writer and a anthropologist. Spanish major Chelsea Johanson will also comment on her work translating one of Karina’s short stories into English.
The event includes a Q and A with Pacheco on questions such as (but not necessarily limited to):
• Women writers in Peru
• Fiction in Latin America
• Translating women’s writers
This WGS at Work event is funded by the Dr. Ann Margaret Johnstone Lecture Series and the Department of Modern Languages and Classics. Dr. Johnstone was the first tenure track faculty member in the computer science program at the University of Maine. Johnstone had a love for creative writing, and the Lecture Fund in Johnstone name was established by her friends and family in 1996, and as a gift for computer science (in odd years) and WGS (in even years).
Multiple Events/ Times
- 9/18 11-12:15pm @Nevill Hall, Bailey Lewis Graduate Assistant for Student Wellness at UMaine, Master of Social Work program
To see he full list and details click here.
WGS @ Work Series Past Events/Discussions
Past WGS @ Work Series Events
Tuesday, September 23, 11:00 -12:15, Bangor Room in the Memorial Union
Speaker: local author Amber Hathway
Coffee and light snacks provided!
istening to Embodied Experiences in Healthcare and Athletics
We all have bodies, of course. We all thus move through the world as embodied beings — but how do factors such as where we live, our age, appearance, gender identity, and sexuality, and income, impact how we feel (physically but also emotionally) and over the course of a lifespan?
Presenters will explore this and other related questions from a variety of disciplinary and professional experiences – and so to spark a dynamic dialogue with each other and the larger audience!
Wednesday, October 15, 1:00-1:50,
Bump Room in the Memorial Union
Coffee and cookies provided!
Upcoming non-WGS Work Series Events/Discussion
“Feminism is for everybody.” – bell hooks