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The Women’s and Gender Studies program at ��ñ���� has now been changed to Feminist and Gender Studies to reflect new directions in the field and to better represent the department’s values and ongoing focus on feminist scholarship and gender studies. The program continues to offer honours, major, and minor options.  

“[The department] is excited to have a name that better reflects the ongoing focus on feminist scholarship in our course offerings, while continuing to highlight gender as a key site for analyzing power and inequality,” says Department Head Dr. Leslie Kern. 
 
With new insights into how gender is constructed and how gendered oppression functions, the program name change signifies a move away from binary conceptions of gender, while recognizing that gender remains a significant site of oppression.  
 
The program will be celebrating its 25th anniversary this fall. The program began in 1999 with courses in women's studies and women's history taught by the late Dr. Marie Hammond-Callaghan and Dr. Elaine Naylor, now retired. Under the leadership of Dr. Hammond-Callaghan, who was the program’s only faculty member for many years, the program underwent its first name and scope change in 2009 to Women’s and Gender Studies. 
 
Students interested in the program will find a wide range of timely and important topics covered in the courses, including reproductive justice, feminist activism, global feminist movements, care work, settler colonialism, and the relationship between gender and science. Courses will now be listed as FGST in Self-Service.  

Krista Johnston will be the Department Head of Feminist and Gender Studies as of July 1, 2024. 

For more information, visit and follow the department on Instagram @fgst.mta