News

Professor Minoo Moallem curates an Iranian Film Series at BAMPFA.

‘First lady’ of Iranian film to speak in Berkeley during BAMPFA series - article in Berkelyside

GWS is expanding — new faculty, a new Queer and Trans Praxis Minor, and a proposed PhD program. None of it happens without donor support. #BigGive ends at 9 PM PT. Give now:https://givingday.berkeley.edu/giving-day/108613/department/108740

In February 2026 the departments of Gender & Women's Studies and African American & African Diaspora Studies celebrated the legacies of June Jordan.

• February 24: Poetry for the People: The June Jordan Experience

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Summer 2026 Course Offerings in Gender and Women's Studies: 

GWS 10 - INTRODUCTION TO GENDER AND WOMEN’S STUDIES, CN 12917, in person, session D

NEW!
Book Review by Dennis Ekwemnachukwu Okeke in Cultural Studies of Paola Bacchetta's book Co-Motion: Re-Thinking Power, Subjects, and Feminist and Queer Alliances. Okeke draws connections between the theory and African struggles.

L&S News Story on graduate student and Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality alum, Ben Papadopoulos.

From Ms. Magazine:

Our Graduates’ Successes: What the Data Tells Us About the Value of Women’s and Gender Studies Degrees

A running list of GWS People in the News.....

Introduction

Sabina Dhillon, the 2025 GWS Commencement Student Speaker, gave an impressive speech. If you missed the ceremony, here is a highlight followed by the full text:

Feminism is about freedom.
  Freedom to live.
  Freedom to love.
  Freedom to return Indigenous land.
  Freedom to be safe in your body, your home, your truth.
  Freedom to move.
  Freedom to stay.
Feminism must be abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist or it is not feminism at all.

- Sabina Dhillon (5/20/2025)

The 2025 Gender & Women's Studies Commencement is happening on Tuesday, May 20th at 4pm in West Pauley Ballroom. Our Commencement Speaker is Professor Savannah Shange, from UC Santa Cruz. Congratulations to our graduates!

summer.berkeley.edu

Join the Department of Gender & Women's Studies for a Two-Day Conference on Decolonizing Gender & Sexualities, March 10 & 11, 2025.

Professor Bacchetta is contributing co-editor, with Soraya El Kahlaoui and Sigrid Vertommen, of a special issue of the journal Kohl titled "A Lexicon for Bridging Decolonial Queer Feminisms and Materialist Feminisms." (Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring 2025). Former Berkeley students Dr. Kerby Lynch and Dr. Omi Salas-SantaCruz, and former Berkeley postdoc Dr. P.J. Di Pietro, are all contributors to the special issue, along with Dr. Bacchetta.

UC Berkeley scholars say the economy, sexism and conspiracies fueled Trump’s reelection

with GWS's Professor Eric Stanley.

Dr. Paola Bacchetta (Professor and Vice Chair for Research, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley), Dr. Elizabeth Löwe Hunter (PhD from Berkeley’s African Diaspora Studies, currently a Wenner-Gren Foundation Hunt Fellow), and Dr. Lene Myong (Professor, Chair of Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger, Norway), won a Peder Sather research grant for their collaborative research project on "Transracial Intimacies: Exploring Racialization from within the Nordic Family".

Listen in as GWS Professor and Chair, Leslie Salzinger discusses the recent election on KALW's program Your Call.

https://www.kalw.org/show/your-call/2024-11-12/over-75m-americans-voted-for-the-most-sexist-campaign-in-us-history

Happening on September 27, 2024

The theme of UCLA’s 27th annual QGrad Conference – NONSENSE – asks us to consider sense and who gets to make it. Queerness, according to Jack Halberstam, stems from “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices.” In other words, nonsense.

GWS Professor Minoo Moallem and GWS Chancellor's Postdoctoral Scholar Amir Aziz received a UCHRI Award for the conference Media and Migration, in collaboration with Film & Media graduate students Osa Osarugue Otebele and Allyson Unzicker.

Read all about the happenings in GWS during 2023-2024: https://gws.berkeley.edu/about-gws/newsletters

Professor Paola Bacchetta gave a talk in April at the Fourth Annual Maghrebian Book Fair Conference in Oujda, Morocco entitled "Towards Decolonial Translating: Reflections on francophoning-anglophoning 'Les Lionnes''."  At the center of the talk was "Les Lionnes" (The Lionesses), a previously unpublished co-authored film project by the Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist Fatema Mernissi, psychiatrist Jalil Bennani and film-maker Hamid Benani, which Professor Bacchetta translated (French to English) and which is forthcoming in the book she co-edited with Profes

Register for a Summer Course

The journal Society + Space has a group of reflections on Eric Stanley's book Atmospheres of Violence.

Enjoy new books by GWS Professor of the Graduate School, Trinh T. Minh-ha:

The Twofold Commitment, New York: Primary Information, 2023
https://primaryinformation.org/.../the-twofold-commitment/

Traveling in the Dark, Milan, Italy: Mousse Publishing, 2023
https://mailchi.mp/moussemagazine.it/trinh-t-minh-ha

A lovely article in Art in America, about Professor Trinh Minh-ha, By Tausif Noor. It includes a discussion about the Spring 2023 symposium organized by GWS Professor Courtney Morris entitled Form + Forces.

How Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Game-Changing Films Thwart Binary Thinking

https://chowdhurycenter.berkeley.edu

Bay Area Now 9is the ninth iteration of YBCA’s signature triennial exhibition highlighting artists working throughout the Bay Area’s nine counties. EachBANis an attempt to answer the question: What are artists making, thinking, dreaming about right now?

New article by Minoo Moallem:

“Weaving Connections: Carpet Art, Community + Environment” de Young\Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, March 2023.

The California Legislature has approved Sen. Nancy Skinner’s SB 345, which would provide legal protections for California health care practitioners that provide or dispense medication or other services for abortion, contraception or gender-affirming care, regardless of their patient’s geographic location.

Professor Elora Shehabuddin’s bookSisters in the Mirrorwas selected as a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Titleby the American Library Association and awarded the 2023 Coomaraswamy Book Prizefrom the Association for Asian Studies.