The Program in Gender and Women’s History is home to a diverse group of students who have come to Madison from around the U.S. or abroad to study gender and women’s history and conduct research on a wide range of national and comparative topics. The program offers seminars on women’s and gender history in different parts of the world as well as a team-taught core seminar on the comparative and transnational history of women and gender. Students and faculty regularly participate in a workshop that invites outside speakers and also gives students and faculty the opportunity to present their work in an informal setting. In addition to studying history, most of our students also work with faculty outside our program who specialize in diverse disciplines such as music, Afro-American studies, the history of medicine, communication arts, and human ecology.
Training
All students in the graduate program take a team-taught core seminar (History 752) on the comparative and transnational history of women and gender. The topic of the seminar changes with the faculty. A recent version of this course, for example, focused on women and political activism, and was team-taught by a Latin Americanist and a European historian.
Students in the program generally take their other courses in their primary field of study and meet all of its requirements. (For example, students in the European branch must complete the M.A. or Ph.D. requirements for students in European history.) While fulfilling their primary-field requirements, however, students work under the supervision of a PGWH faculty member in their primary field and take at least two gender-specific courses.