Welcome

The Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research offers an interdisciplinary forum for the study of gender, its function in cultures and societies, and its intersection with race and class. Students may choose from three areas of concentration within the BA program: General Concentration, Concentration in Theories and Politics of Sexuality, Concentration in Gender and International Development. A minor in Women's Studies and a minor in Theories and Politics of Sexuality are also available. The Center offers master's and doctoral students the Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies in conjunction with (other) degree programs. Graduate students may choose a thesis or non-thesis Master of Arts degree.For more information on specific programs, please refer to the Undergraduate or Graduate pages. To support the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research, please click on this link.

News and Announcements

Laura Edwards presents the Gary C. and Eleanor G. Simons Lecture in American History

April 3, 5pm
Ustler Hall Atrium

Please join Laura Edwards (Duke University) as she speaks on “Women, the Civil War, and the Legal Transformation of the United States. Edwards explores how legal changes that resulted from the Civil War actually unfolded in people’s houses and backyards–and thus involved women, even though they were denied extended federal protection for their civil and political rights. Click on this link for an event flyer.

The Mapping of Alternative Sovereignties: Violence, Politics, and Prophecy in Jamaica

A Lecture by Dr. Deborah Thomas
Friday, April 5, 4pm
FAB 105

Ethnographer, theorist, and filmmaker, University of Pennsylvania professor Deborah A. Thomas is a distinguished scholar in Caribbean Studies. She addresses the politics of culture and performing arts, embodied citizenship, contestations over sovereignty, Rastafarian claims to reparations and indigeneity, and the interplay of race, gender, modernity, and globalization. Most of her research has focused on Jamaica and its transnational citizenry. With John Jackson, Jr. and Junior "Gabu" Wedderburn, she directed/produced the film, "Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens." She is the author of Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica and Exceptional Violence : Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. This lecture is presented by these UF units: The Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations, the Department of Anthropology and the African-American Studies Program. Click here for an event flyer.

King Hunter

Art Installation 
MFA Photography Candidate Elena Dahl
Opening: Saturday, April 6th, Ustler Hall Atrium

King Hunter is an installation by MFA Photography candidate Elena Dahl of a midcentury modern kitchen blueprint, designed in 1956 by Margaret King Hunter and built in multiple homes throughout the U.S. by General Electric. This blueprint will be installed in the Ustler Hall atrium in the form of colorful patterned tiles, paying homage to a female modernist architect while highlighting non-homogenous aspects of women's progress. Join us for an opening on Saturday, April 6th, from 7-9pm in the Atrium of Ustler Hall at The Center for Women's and Gender Studies. Refreshments will be served.Click on this link for more information.

The Hunger Games: A Roundtable Discussion

Wednesday, April 10th, 2013, Noon
Ustler Hall Atrium

Fantasy/Science fiction are genres that often offer trenchant social critique of the society we live in, but is this the case in Hollywood’s adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ brilliant trilogy, The Hunger Games? If you are a fan of Suzanne Collins’ work or have seen the film, come join a conversation about the books and film, led by a panel of scholars from the English, Women’s Studies and History Departments.Panelists include Stephanie Smith, Professor of English, Anastasia Ulanowicz, Assistant Professor of English, Rebekkah Fitzsimmons, Graduate Student in English, and Louise Newman, Associate Professor of History.Please click on this link for an event flyer.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Gendering Mestizaje in Early Colonial Bogotá

A Lecture by Joanne Rappaport
Thursday, April 18, 5:00 p.m.
FAB 103

To evaluate what being a mestizo meant in the early colonial Andes, we must examine the permeability of those categories that exhibited some degree of “groupness”: Indians, Spaniards, and Africans. This presentation focuses on the relationship between being Spanish and being mestizo through a reading of the quandaries of a series of elite mestizos who strove to be accepted in Spanish social circles. These stories demonstrate that for elite women of mixed parentage there was no identifiable boundary between “Spanish” and “mestizo,” while elite mestizo men encountered real barriers erected to the assumption of “Spanishness.” Joanne Rappaport holds a joint appointment in Anthropology and Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. She is the author of Cumbe Reborn: An Andean Ethnography of History, Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia, and The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. Click here for an event flyer.

Judith Page, Director

Dr. Judith Page

Judith W. Page, Director of the Center, is a Professor of English at the University of Florida and has been an affiliate faculty member with the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research and the Center for Jewish Studies. A PhD from the University of Chicago, she has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships from the NEH as well as a Skirball Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (2003), and, most recently, a Visiting Fellowship at the Chawton House Library in the UK (2008), a repository of texts and manuscripts pertaining to early British women writers.

Dr. Page has had a long engagement with Women’s Studies, having served as founding director of the program at Millsaps College, where she taught and held several administrative positions before coming to the University of Florida. She is the author of numerous articles and reviews, and her books include Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women, Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture, and Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England's Disciples of Flora, 1780-1870 (Cambridge UP, 2011) co-authored with art historian Elise L. Smith. Analyzing women's literature, botanical writings, and visual arts, as well as horticultural and educational texts, this book argues that gardens broadly defined provided women with a new language and authority to negotiate between domestic space and the larger world.

Kathryn Chicone Ustler Hall

Built in 1919, the structure fell into disuse in 1979 but was saved from demolition in 1988 when it was granted protection under the National Register of Historic Places. A generous donation from sociology alumna Kathryn Chicone Ustler in 2000 allowed for the vacant gym to be transformed into a 14,700 square-foot academic treasure. The restoration process began in 2004, and Women’s Studies moved into the facility in July, 2006.

Ustler Hall, a beautifully renovated, freestanding three-story building, includes classrooms, seminar rooms, a two-story atrium, and faculty and administrative offices for the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research. This building is the first one on the UF campus renamed to honor a woman. To support the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research, please click on this link.

For more information on renting the Atrium at Ustler Hall please contact Donna Tuckey or call 273-0382. To review the rules and rates, click on this link.