Our highly successful Graduate Certificate Program offers you the following:
• interdisciplinary intellectual community around issues of gender and sexuality
• exposure to current debates within feminism across schools and departments
• tools to integrate feminist thought into your work
• eligibility to apply for CSWGS’s Visionary Partners Dissertation Fellowship, employment as course instructor or TA, and/or research travel support
• enhanced employment opportunities inside and outside the academy.
When students have completed the requirements below and are within a year of their PhD defense, they can apply for a certificate fellowship of $5,000.
Overview of Requirements
Students take 2 core courses:
SWGS 501 “Feminist Debates,” which balances historical understanding of questions that have occupied feminist scholars and activists since “women’s studies” first emerged on college campuses with in-depth exposure to current issues and scholarship; and
SWGS 502 “Gender, the Disciplines, & Interdisciplinarity,” a publication workshop, in which students take an article or conference paper from an earlier class, usually in their discipline, and develop it for publication. Students discuss a variety of feminist methods and approaches, and are helped to shape their own work for different kinds of disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals while defining their own feminist intervention in current scholarship;
and 1 graduate elective in their own or another department.
Students also attend, at their own pace, Graduate Colloquia events. These events are comprised of the Center’s public lectures and lunchtime seminars. At these 90-minute seminars – which include lunch and are restricted to our students – visiting scholars share their work-in-progress, or Rice faculty present a specific methodology. Many Graduate Colloquium events come in pairs and count as 2 events (i.e. one visiting scholar holds a lecture and a seminar); others are single events (either a lecture or a lunchtime seminar). All are designated as "Graduate Colloquium" events in their event announcements, and enrolled students receive email invitations. A sign-in sheet at each event helps track attendance. A total of 12 individual events completes this requirement.
Our graduate certificate dates back to 2004, and we have over 70 alumni from 8 departments. While the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality is housed in the School of Humanities, we draw on courses from the Schools of Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as other schools when they offer courses that fit our themes.
Interested? Please do the following to declare the graduate certificate:
1. Declare interest in the graduate certificate to us at the Center.
2. Come to an advising meeting with the CSWGS Director of Graduate Studies, Prof. Lora Wildenthal, CSWGS Director. She will contact you for a meeting after receiving your interest form.
3. You must also formally declare the graduate certificate with the Registrar's Office—we cannot do that for you! Bring the registrar’s form to the advising meeting—the Director of Graduate Studies can sign the form there. (The registrar’s form can also be handled online.)
Learn more about our graduate certificate in Rice’s General Announcements (GA).