Fifteen years after it was created by Boston-area feminist scholars, the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies began accepting Boston University students this year, allowing them to sample classes team-taught by professors from various Boston schools.
In 1991, scholars brought Boston institutions together with the establishment of the GCWS, allowing graduate students from participating universities to take unique courses in areas of contemporary academic concern, according to GCWS Program Coordinator Andi Sutton. However, BU administrators initially opposed women’s studies and kept faculty and students from joining the consortium.
This year, BU became an official member of the Consortium, and BU graduate students Jaclyn Rosebrook-Collignon and Matylda Bylinska have enrolled in several GCWS courses. Previously, the College of Arts and Sciences only offered women’s studies courses and minors to undergraduate students.
“For the students, the Consortium provides a space for them to push their own thinking beyond a single discipline and see cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration modeled by their instructors,” Sutton said in an email.
According to BU Women’s Studies Program Director Shahla Haeri, professors Nina Silber, Dorothy Kelly and Deborah Belle, as well as CAS Dean Jeffrey Henderson, Associate Deans Susan Jackson and Scott Whitaker pushed for BU’s participation in the consortium. Only Provost David Campbell needed to give the final word.
“Provost David Campbell very generously accepted to sign the memorandum of understanding and to give the fees,” Haeri said, “and to allow BU to join the consortium and also allow students to take courses.”
The Consortium include nine schools: Boston College, BU, Brandeis University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Simmons College, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, Northeastern University and Tufts University. This academic year, the Consortium is offering courses in Feminist Inquiry, Gender, Race and the Construction of the American West, Gender, Politics and Nationalism and Gender-Armed Conflict and Peacemaking.
All courses offered by the GCWS are team-taught by two or three professors from different universities. Each year, professors create new courses that must meet standards outlined in the program’s mission statement. According to the GCWS website, “the Consortium pursues its mission through an ongoing series of team-taught graduate seminars, interdisciplinary faculty workshops and other opportunities for scholarly and administrative collaboration.”
BC sociology professor and Consortium member Sharlene Hesse-Biber said she was drawn to the Consortium for the opportunity to teach in an interdisciplinary environment.
“As feminist scholarship has developed, it has become increasingly clear that the practice of feminist research is interdisciplinary,” she said in an email.
Haeri said she hopes BU’s participation in the GCWS will develop the women’s studies program at BU into a full department that can offer a women’s studies major.
“As we become part of this Consortium, we hope to learn new ideas, gain new experiences with other people and to establish this institution,” she said. “Also, I hope to make the idea of gender studies a lot more pervasive in the university campuses. I hope we are able to offer a lot more exciting, relevant courses for both males and females.”