The Graduate Consortium for Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality is seeking proposals for our core courses (Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women’s and Gender Studies, Feminist and Queer Theory, and Feminist and Queer Methodology) in addition to rotating elective courses.

We are particularly interested in offering courses that incorporate queer theory, transgender theory, post-colonial studies, Indigenous studies, critical race theory, and other disciplines that are often marginalized by university systems. It is one of our main goals to offer courses that extend and enhance what is available to graduate students enrolled at member institutions and provide faculty with a unique opportunity for professional growth.

When designing courses, faculty should keep the following goals in mind:

• Explicit consideration of how interdisciplinary inquiry puts pressure on what counts as knowledge in individual disciplinary orientations;

• Systematic attention to intersections of race, class, and culture with gender as categories of analysis;

• Social and cross-cultural dimensions that ground both the concrete issues and the theory addressed in the course; and

• Attention to the implications of theory, practice, and/or policy implications of the material. In addition, courses should be designed to explore disciplinary and/or methodological conditions of knowledge.

Previous courses have included:

Course Information

GCWS courses incorporate 13-15 weeks of instruction. The fall semester runs the Wednesday after Labor Day through the first week of December. The spring semester runs from the last week in January until the first week in May. The teaching faculty have full autonomy to select the day and time for the course. Courses can be offered on the MIT campus, virtually, or at the faculty’s home institution.

Core courses

Our core courses are taught by one instructor and they include:

• Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women’s and Gender Studies (a full year course that meets every other week)

• Feminist and Queer Theory (offered in fall semester)

• Feminist and Queer Methods (offered in spring semester)

topic Based courses

Our rotating topic courses (up to three per year) are collaboratively developed and team-taught with faculty from different disciplines and institutions.

Download previous course syllabi

Faculty are encouraged to be innovative, creative, and bold in their course topic selection, syllabus design, and pedagogical practices. Previous syllabi for our core and topic based courses can be found in this Google Folder. All syllabi are reviewed with this rubric. If you want additional examples of syllabi or have questions, please contact the GCWS Program Manager.

Eligibility & Compensation

Tenured, tenure track, lecturers, and Emerita faculty from our member institutions can teach for the GCWS. At minimum, syllabi must be approved in the academic year prior to being taught (for example, a course offered in Fall 2025 or Spring 2026 would need to be approved during 2024-2025). Faculty leading the Dissertation Workshop should have substantial experience working with PhD students.

The GCWS has a memorandum of understanding with the Provost of each member institution. Faculty can be compensated in a number of ways depending on their status:

• Tenure and tenure track faculty, of any discipline, can teach for the GCWS as part of their standard teaching load at their home institution. The GCWS Program Manager and board representative from your institution can provide additional information and support throughout this process.

• Tenure and tenure track faculty can teach a GCWS course in addition to their standard course load at their home institution. In this situation, faculty will be hired as a lecturer at MIT and paid by GCWS. As of 2023, the MIT lecturer rate ranges between $11,500 and $13,900 per course (determined by number of relevant teaching years).

• Lecturers from member institutions will be hired as a lecturer at MIT and paid by GCWS. As of 2023, the MIT lecturer rate ranges between $11,500 and $13,900 per course (determined by number of relevant teaching years).

Teaching Teams

GCWS topic based courses are team-taught by faculty in different disciplines and at different institutions. You do not need to have a co-instructor in order to propose a course idea. The GCWS Program Office and Board routinely assist in creating teaching teams. Faculty teams are created in a number of ways:

1. Through personal contacts between faculty members or conversations that occur at GCWS events;

2. With the assistance of and targeted outreach by the GCWS Program Manager and/or Board of Directors;

3. By responding to a GCWS calls for course proposals and being matched with another faculty member interested in the same topic;

4. Making connections via the GCWS Faculty Database