Women's and Gender Studies Fund for Excellence

The Women’s and Gender Studies Fund for Excellence is a vital means for providing ongoing support for the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS). We are a small but ambitious department that plays an outsized role at Stony Brook University in empowering the next generation of women leaders, LGBTQ voices and allies for gender and sexual justice and equality.

The WGSS Department prepares undergraduate students to become future professionals, scholars, activists and artists who engage critically with the social, economic and environmental challenges we face, including violence against girls and women, climate change, the expansion of the carceral state, anti-immigrant policies, increasing state oppression of gender and sexual minorities and threats to education. We are at the forefront of social justice initiatives on campus, and many of our majors and minors have gone on to law school, medical school, and to work in public health, as teachers, as organizers and as advocates.

Our doctoral program is attracting top students who are already making a mark on the field through cutting-edge research on a variety of important topics, including reproductive justice movements in India; political, medical, scientific and aesthetic responses to HIV/AIDS; the history, science and politics of international women’s sports; a comparative analysis of gender equality movements in Muslim societies; gender and armed conflict in South Asia; and more. With your support, we will be able to continue recruiting and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students who go out and change the world for the better.

Your generous contribution will allow us to cultivate, sustain and further excellence in WGSS through undergraduate scholarships, graduate research stipends, travel funds for both undergraduate and graduate students to present their research at conferences, and a colloquium series on mentoring and professional development for faculty and graduate students.