Overview

Welcome USM Students, Faculty, and Friends,

Women and Gender Studies (WGS) at USM is the longest standing feminist studies program in northern New England and it continues to be one of the most vibrant.  With a faculty drawn from across the university WGS engages in transformative teaching, scholarship, and social change on campus and in the community. WGS not only contributes many courses to the university’s general education curriculum, it also offers a socially-engaged and academically rigorous major and a minor.  This semester, the program is offering ten advanced electives on subjects as diverse as “Gender, Race, Class and the City,” “Joan of Arc,” “Gender and Aging,” “David Bowie,” and “Africa, Social Justice and Exile.”  Women and Gender Studies students are also interning with community partners including Equality Maine, Learning Works, Spurwink Services, Meg Perry Center, Hardy Girls Healthy Women, and the Maine Women's Policy Center.

During the spring, WGS will also be contributing to the cultural, intellectual, and political life of the campus and the surrounding community through the presentation of films, lectures, and performances; almost all WGS programming events are free and all of them are open to the public. The full list of spring programs, including times and locations, can be found inside this newsletter but I would like to highlight two of our upcoming events: on Friday March 16^th, the program will be celebrating Women’s History Month with the world premier of a new play by Reza Jalali “The Poets and the Assassin” in which he imagines the lives of women in ancient and contemporary Iran; the 7 p.m. performance in Talbot Hall (USM Portland campus) is free and open to the public.  And on Thursday April 19^th the program is partnering with the Department of Environmental Science to mark the 50^th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s masterpiece Silent Spring; in a free and public presentation, Carson’s legacy in Maine will be discussed by some of Maine’s most prominent environmental leaders at 5 p.m .in Hannaford Hall (USM Portland campus).   

If you have any questions about upcoming events, specific WGS courses, or majoring or minoring in the program, please drop us an email <wgs@usm.maine.edu>, call the office 780-4289, or come by the WGS office (at 94 Bedford St. on the Portland campus, Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.).  We look forward to meeting you.

Warm regards,
Wendy Chapkis
Director of Women and Gender Studies and Professor of Sociology