Pembroke Center

Gender and Sexuality Studies Program

The Gender and Sexuality Studies Program encourages students to examine the complex ways that gender and sexuality are produced culturally, politically, and epistemologically in conjunction with categories of race and ethnicity, nationality, class, religion, and ability.

The Gender and Sexuality Studies Program (GNSS), which is housed in the Pembroke Center and offers an undergraduate concentration and graduate certificate program, is the only place at Brown where students can examine the centrality of gender and sexuality in the distribution of power and resources in social, cultural, political, economic, and scientific/biomedical contexts.Audience for GNSS lecture

Interdisciplinary in its framing and approach, the GNSS program extends the Pembroke Center's commitment to critical scholarship on the struggles faced by people across national and transnational contexts whose sex, gender identity or sexual orientation make them vulnerable to violence in various forms. Students in the concentration explore how what counts as knowledge about gender and sexuality is mobilized within and beyond the classroom. Scholarship in ethnic and race studies; indigenous and native studies; and transnational and postcolonial studies informs the questions students address.

Graduate students pursue the graduate certificate in gender and sexuality studies to develop methodological and theoretical expertise in this interdisciplinary field while fulfilling the graduate requirements ofStudents in Transpacific Femininities class their degree-granting department. The certificate provides opportunities for advanced, specialized professional training and fosters a community of scholars dedicated to the study of the intersections of gender and sexuality with other related fields, such as critical race and ethnic studies, cultural studies, transnational and postcolonial studies, science and technology studies, disability studies, performance studies, and media studies, as well as more traditional disciplines.

In addition to the undergraduate concentration and graduate certificate program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Pembroke Center annually convenes the interdisciplinary Pembroke Seminar, which brings together senior and junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates. Seminar participants collectively  pursue a set of critical questions in weekly meetings over the course of the academic year.

"People approach gender and sexuality studies in different ways. The Pembroke Center is open to creative avenues, working with the arts, and experimenting with new ways of looking at the world. Powerful things arise in this interdisciplinary space, where there is room to reflect on how race, gender, and sex are all entwined together."

Hang My Tran '19 GNSS concentrator & winner of the 2019 Joan Wallach Scott Prize
 
Image of student Hang My Tran '19

For undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty

In the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, students have the freedom to design their own pathway through the concentration. GNSS students receive individual guidance and advising from a core group of faculty who work closely with them through every stage of the concentration.
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The graduate certificate program enables Brown doctoral students to develop expertise in the field of gender and sexuality studies.
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