Nancy Cott’s 1985 Guggenheim Fellowship precipitated a leadership transition that demonstrated Women’s Studies fundamental stability. Stepping in first as Acting Chair, Margaret Homans soon became one of the Program’s innovators and most reliable leaders. Indeed, Homans’ dedication to the Program ultimately made her its longest serving chair: eleven years over a two decade period. In her very first year of chairship, Homans presided over the second joint faculty search: in conjunction with Anthropology, Women’s Studies hired Micaela di Leonardo, who substantially broadened the Program’s reach into the social sciences. As the NEH grant concluded, a Ford Foundation Grant began, one that helped establish ties between Women’s Studies faculty at fourteen recently coeducated institutions. The collaborative resources of this new grant further energized the Program’s ongoing commitment to engage race, ethnicity, and sexuality as foundational analytic categories within feminist scholarship. New faculty members hired in other departments joined with longstanding professors to become deeply involved in this work: Mahzarin Banaji, for example, organized and chaired a faculty development seminar, the Multi-Ethnic Women’s Organizing Committee, that worked to eradicate racism and ethnocentrism from research and teaching. Joined by others such as Gloria Watkins (bell hooks) and Kathleen Daly, Banaji significantly reshaped the course offerings of the program. The 1988 arrival of Emily Honig, Women’s Studies’ third hire (jointly appointed with the History Department) added still more momentum; as a scholar of women in China, Honig fostered an international turn in several courses. In this same period, The Gay and Lesbian Studies Center at Yale emerged, claiming critical constitutive space for sexuality studies in the University’s scholarly enterprise and offering Women’s Studies an especially fruitful intellectual partnership.
The expanding academic aspirations that took shape in this period emerged not just at Yale but across the field, as scholars and activists alike shifted from a singular notion of “woman” into a more complex understandings of “women” inflected by race, class, sexuality, and other social hierarchies. It was a time of excitement and important developments. Already popular undergraduate classes grew still larger in response to these newly inclusive models of scholarship. Over the course of the 1990s, the Women’s Studies curriculum continued to expand in compelling new directions. Laura Wexler emerged in this period as yet another visionary leader, one who kept Women’s Studies afloat in often difficult times. Wexler’s involvement with the program began in 1988, but formalized when she was granted a joint appointment with American Studies in 1992. As long-term DUS and then long-term Chair, Wexler collaborated with other faculty on an incredible range of creative initiatives that helped maintain Women’s Studies’ high standards for innovative research and scholarship. In 1993, the Yale Development Office solicited funding for increased research and teaching in Lesbian and Gay Studies. As this FLAGS initiative brought visiting lecturers to campus, Women’s Studies deepened their collaboration with Lesbian and Gay Studies by offering a curricular home—and undergraduates benefitted immensely from regular, innovative courses in sexuality studies. Other opportunities emerged as Women’s Studies initiated more formal ties with the professional schools. Working with scholars from the Yale School of Medicine, for example, the Program developed a course in women’s health that was, in 1994, perhaps the first such course in the country.
Recognizing that the parameters of the field were changing nationally as well as at Yale, Women’s Studies has twice changed its name. First, in 1998, the Program added “gender” to its title, becoming Women’s and Gender Studies. Later, under Wexler’s leadership in 2004, the name expanded again, to take its current shape as “Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.” The conversations around each of the name changes provided rich opportunities for faculty and students to reflect upon the scholarly and pedagogic work of the Program. Capturing these insights, the Directors of Undergraduate Studies of these times (Wexler in 1998 and Maria Trumpler in 2004) revised the requirements of the undergraduate major, providing newly productive frameworks for the already rigorous paths of study.
In the early 2000s, the longstanding community of associated graduate students sought more formal recognition of their academic engagement with Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In 2004, the Program initiated a Graduate Qualification (now Certificate) in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies—a formal set of criteria by which students could affirm the significant place of gender and sexuality studies within their own scholarship. In subsequent years, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies has increasingly prioritized programs and research exploring women, gender, and sexuality from a transnational and global perspective.