Welcome
The Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale offers a variety of courses and an undergraduate major (BA) as well as a combined PhD. The Program establishes gender and sexuality as fundamental categories of social and cultural analysis. Drawing on history, literature, cultural studies, social science, and science, it offers interdisciplinary perspectives from which to study the diversity of human experience. Gender—the social meaning of the distinction between the sexes—and sexuality—sexual identities, discourses, and institutions—are studied as they intersect with class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and transnational movements.
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Video recording of WGSS Prof Rod Ferguson in conversation with Miss Major Griffin-Gracy
February 4, 2026
Dear friends,
The 2024 James Robert Brudner ‘83 Memorial Prize was awarded to Miss Major to honor her life-long fight for social justice and liveable lives for LGBT folks. We are happy to share the video recording of Professor Roderick Ferguson in conversation with Miss Major at Yale on October 23rd, 2024. We did not know how lucky we were to have her on campus before her passing a year later, on October 13th, 2025.
We hope Miss Major’s powerful voice and vision, her commitment to a project of collective world-building and her refusal to surrender the fight will give you some hope during these challenging times for our communities.
Combined Ph.D. Program
Beginning in 2021, we welcomed our first cohort of students pursuing dual doctoral degrees in WGSS and American Studies, Anthropology, Black Studies, English and Sociology.
Our faculty work on questions of gender and sexuality from a wide range of theoretical and methodological locations, concentrating our attention on transnational politics and security regimes, public law and sexual violence, reproduction and reproductive technologies, incarceration, social movements and protest, race and racism, neoliberalism, and Islam.
