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| Volume 13, Issue 1 Summer 2026 |
Compiled by Moe Gardner Layout, YPPS |
From the Chair of WGSS
by Rod FergusonI have been fortunate to chair departments with some of the healthiest institutional cultures that any university could claim—ones in which most of its members have been clear about their collective purpose. My time at Yale has had the additional luxury of resources to match that clarity... |
From the Chair of LGBTS
by Evren SavciIt is my pleasure to be writing my first newsletter entry as the incoming Chair of LGBT Studies. I have big shoes to fill following my colleague Joe Fischel who has done extraordinary work in his role as the previous Chair. Yet I am also excited to take over the baton especially in times when research, writing and teaching LGBT Studies is as critical and urgent as it gets... |
Tribute to Margaret Homansby Rod Ferguson |
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Our Margaret Homans is the Bird White Housum Professor of English and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and is the author of important works on Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Queen Victoria, Dorothy Wordsworth, Virginia Wolfe, nineteenth century literature, the contemporary novel, queer studies, and transnational adoption. In these works, she has explored what it means to be a human as well as the socially constructed nature of gender. Her retirement, though, gives us an occasion to reflect on her role as an institution builder for our program and for this campus... |
Tribute to Rod Ferguson |
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The Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies sends our deepest gratitude to Prof. Rod Ferguson for his time as Chair. For more than a half-decade, Prof. Ferguson’s extraordinary leadership fortified our undergraduate, graduate, and faculty communities. His accomplishments during his tenure are many... |
2025-2026 WGSS Colloquium and Working Groupby Carlo Sariego and Zahra Abba OmarAs co-convenors of the WGSS Colloquium, we were proud to feature an exciting range of research during the 2025-2026 academic year. Our Fall 2025 lineup began with a Colloquium session featuring Golasa Mirzaei (Sociology & WGSS) on Iran’s first reality dating show and how online debates about the show reveal divergent public interpretations of feminism...
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2025-26 Brudner Prize Awarded to Eli Clareby Jiya Pandya |
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The James Robert Brudner ‘83 Memorial Prize, established in 2000, is awarded annually to an accomplished scholar, artist, or activist whose work has made significant contributions for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and sexual minority communities. This year, the committee on LGBT studies and the WGSS faculty were honored to present the 2025-26 prize to scholar, writer, and activist Eli Clare. The award sought to celebrate Clare’s groundbreaking work, which, since 1999, has offered pathways for rethinking disability, queerness, and transness as inextricable from one another. Across four books, the canonical Exile and Pride, the more recent Brilliant Imperfection, his access-art collection Marrow's Telling, and his newest, from which he read at Brudner events in New York and New Haven, titled Unfurl. In addition to these published works which have shaped disability justice, environmental justice, and queer and trans liberation movements for nearly three decades now, Clare is also a teacher, accessmaker, and facilitator whose classroom, workshops, and talks have offered inroads into these movements for many who have previously existed at their borders. Clare’s Brudner Prize celebrations took place on September 17th and 18th, 2025, in New York and New Haven. At a conversational workshop hosted by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center in New York on Wednesday, Clare was accompanied by his longtime collaborator, organizer Trishala Deb. An engaged discussion led to a lively and striking collective conversation with the audience, composed of crip, queer, and trans activists, academics, and artists, with topics ranging from access hacks to community care to survival and movement building in the shadow of fascism. At Thursday's event in New Haven, Clare read to a room full of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and community members from their book Unfurl, leading to a moving Q&A after. Students were particularly struck by the shift in tone and the welcoming access environment Clare created in what they anticipated to be an academic talk. |
Course Review: Genealogies of Our Now (WGSS 850)Genealogies of Our Now (WGSS 850) emerged as a rhizomatic afterlife of the required graduate seminar in Feminist and Queer Theories (WGS 700), which we took with Professor Roderick Ferguson in Spring 2025. It began from a shared feeling that the texts we encountered there were never finished with us, nor were we with them. Each session seemed to exceed the time allotted to it. Each text demanded another pass, another pressure, another aperture of attention... |
Make a donation to WGSSWe are deeply grateful for the support of our generous donors who have made the growth of our program possible. Contributions of any amount are welcome at any time. If you have any questions about supporting Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, please send an inquiry to wgss@yale.edu. You may also email development.gifts@yale.edu |
WGSS Director of Undergraduate Studies Review
by Igor De Souza, Lecturer in WGSSIn 2025-2026, WGSS accomplished several things in light of a challenging environment. Despite financial constraints at Yale, we were able to approve 7 projects for undergraduate research to take place in summer ’26, totalling over $20,000, through the Shana Alexander and Andrew Solomon fellowships. We wish to thank our sponsors for their continuing generosity. Our graduating class of 5 students presented their projects at a public forum in late Spring ’26, and all of them obtained distinction in the major... |
WGSS Interim Director of Graduate Studies Reviewby Ayesha Ramachandran, Professor of Comparative LiteratureAs I write this, it’s May already, and while the flowers are in bloom, I’m still struggling to get warm—a sign both of joyful growth and change, and also of the persistent metaphoric chill that underlies our world in this moment. Writing at the end of this eventful academic year, I am grateful for the opportunity to have come to know so many of you as interim DGS.... |
Global Realignments, Ethnographically: A Year in Reviewby Eda Pepi and Ana Ramos-ZayasThis year, the Yale Ethnography Hub (YEH) was administratively housed in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), marking a return to the program that first hosted the Hub during its inaugural 2022–2023 year. In both moments, WGSS has provided an intellectual home for events responsive to the political conditions most shaping everyday life... |
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Accomplishments and Awards
Génesis Luigi Bravo - PhD Student
During the summer of 2024 I served as an intern in femtech nonprofit whose mission is expanding access to safe abortion in Latin America. One paper from that fellowship was just published. It is on digital safeguarding in digital sexual and reproductive health tools was published in Contraception.
Daphne A. Brooks - Faculty - Spring 2026
Newly inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences as well as the Society of American Historians. Editor of the newly-published anthology Blackstar Rising & the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince (Duke UP, 2026).
Jill Campbell - Faculty - Summer 2026
My essay, "Voyage Interrupted: Agriculture, Foraging, and Fiction," will be published in the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies this summer.
Crystal N Feimster - Faculty
I began my term as President of the Southern Association for Women Historians in January 2026. Founded in 1970, SAWH has long served as a vital intellectual and professional home for scholars working on women’s and gender history, southern history, and related fields. I am honored to help lead the organization as we continue supporting new scholarship, mentoring emerging historians, and fostering conversations about the histories of race, gender, labor, politics, and social change across the South and beyond.
Joe Fischel - Faculty
My book, Sodomy's Solicitations: A Right to Queerness, is nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in the category of LGBTQ+ Studies.
The award ceremony took place on June 12, 2026.
Reg Kunzel - Faculty
My book, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life received Honorable Mention for the Disability History Association’s 2025 Outstanding Book Award.
Maia Vitarini Lwin - PhD Student
My first peer-reviewed publication (“Postcards from Another Planet: Losing Gregg Araki’s Queer Alien") is forthcoming in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies. Many thanks to the WGSS faculty and fellow graduate students for their feedback and support!
Westley Montgomery - Faculty - November 2025
Westley Montgomery has been awarded the Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize for the 2024 article “The Many Voices of Sissieretta Jones: Opera and the Sonic Necromancy of the Black Phonographic Archive,” published in Theatre Journal. The prize, awarded by the American Society for Theater Research, recognizes “the best essay written and published in English in a refereed scholarly journal or edited collection,” covering any subject in theatre research.
Tavia Nyong'o - Faculty
I delivered the José Esteban Muñoz Memorial Lecture at New York University in the Fall of 2025.
Eden Rea-Hedrick - PhD Student - February 2026
My article, "Cripping the Sexual Psychopath: The Disability Politics of Leopold and Loeb," has been accepted for publication in Modernism/modernity.
The article was accepted in February 2026 and will appear in Modernism/modernity sometime next year.
Ilianna Vasquez - PhD Student - 2026–2027 Academic Year
Ilianna Vásquez has been awarded three short-term research fellowships for the 2026–2027 academic year at the John Carter Brown Library, the Huntington Library, and the Newberry Library (NCAIS Graduate Student Research Award), where she will conduct archival research for her dissertation.
Minh Huynh Vu - PhD Student - June 2026
An article I've written about cardboard boxes—"On the endless enfoldments of empire and corner infrastructures of living"—was published in the issue (32.3) of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and gay Studies in June 2026.
I was also recently awarded Lambda Literary's 2026 Karla Jay Prize for Emerging Writers in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
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