Examining how gender shapes our experiences

The Women's Studies minor is an interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary program that seeks to provide students and the university community with educational frameworks and strategies for intellectual and personal growth, positive social change, and political awareness that informs active participation in public affairs. It prepares students to gain an awareness of women's issues, to understand how social constructions of gender and sexuality affect and have shaped daily experience, broader social structures, institutions, social relations, and cultural and aesthetic production. By its very definition, attention to gender necessitates an approach that examines gender across race, class, sexuality, age, and nationality.

History: A women's studies committee was convened in 1987 by Nancy Anderson, Barbara Ewell, Connie Mui, and Catherine Wessinger. With the ardent support of Sister Fara Impastato, the committee developed and approved a women's studies minor and program in 1989. In addition, the committee reopened the Women's Resource Center in 1995. The WRC had initially opened in 1975 and closed in 1980. Since the reopening, the Women's Studies program and the Women's Resource Center have collaborated on programming and initiatives. 

Mission: The Women's Studies minor and program at Loyola University New Orleans supports the mission of the university by educating the whole person in a critical and analytical understanding of women and gender across history and cultures and by promoting social justice in both an intellectual and an activist context. 

Who We Are

The Women's Studies program is directed by Patricia Boyett, Committee Women's Resource Center, Director & Department of History, Assistant Professor
Office: 425 Bobet Hall
Campus Box: 84
Phone: 504-865-3078
Email: pbboyett@big5vn.com

Participating faculty also include: 

• Natasha Bingham, Department of Political Science, Associate Professor
  • Steering Committee
• Alice Clark, School of Music & Theatre Arts, Professor
  • Assessment committee
• Anne Daniell, Department of Religious Studies, Visiting Assistant Professor
  • Curriculum Committee
  • Writing Competition Committee
• Jason Ezell, University Library, Associate Dean of Learning & Engagement; Associate Professor
• Allision Edgren, Department of History, Assistant Professor 
  • Grant Committee
  • Co-organizer, Women’s History Month Lecture Series
• Valerie Goertzen, School of Music & Theatre Arts, Professor
  • Grant Committee
  • Steering Committee
• Constance Mui, Department of Philosophy, Professor
  • Steering Committee
• Kedrick Perry, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, Vice President (administration, cabinet)
• Typhanie Jasper Butler, Director OCELTS
• Negina Khalili, Visiting Professor, Criminology & Associate Director, Women’s Resource
  Center (starting fall 2023)
• Janna Saslaw, School of Music & Theatre Arts, Professor
  • Steering Committee
• Lindsay Sproul, Department of English, Assistant Professor
• Sheryl Kennedy Haydel, Director of Mass Communication, Associate Director
• Jaita Talukdar, Department of Sociology, Associate Professor 
  • Steering Committee
• Anne McGlynn-Wright, Department of Sociology, Assistant Professor
• Rae Taylor, Department of Criminology & Justice, Chair/Associate Professor  Sociology
• Victoria Vega, School of Music & Theatre Arts, Professor
  • Writing Competition Committee
• Rachel Wallace, Department of History, Visiting Assistant Professor
• Elizabeth Watkins Department of English, Assistant Professor 
  • Writing Competition Committee
• Kate Yurgil, Department of Psychology, Associate Professor 
  • Curriculum Committee
• Alexandria Smith, College of Music & Media, Visiting Assistant Professor
  • Writing Competition Committee

Women's Studies Subcommittees

Collaborative Faculty-Student Grant Committee: Three members serve on this committee, which awards a $500 grant to support and promote faculty-student collaborations with a focus on women’s issues, including how gender and sexuality affect daily experience, broader social structures, institutions, social relations, and cultural and aesthetic production. Types of projects may include but are not limited to research projects, scholarly papers, creative works, and community events and programming. Sponsored projects should take place during the spring semester and must be completed by the end of the summer semester. Grant recipients are required to give a final presentation to the Loyola community during the following fall or spring semester. The committee, in concert with the Women’s Studies co-chairs, promotes the submissions. The committee develops an evaluation process and collaborates with the Women’s Studies chairs and the Women’s Resource Center director to host the presentation.

Contact Us:

To reach members of the committee, please see the committee members section.  The co-chairs also monitor the following Women’s Studies email for general inquiries. wsc@big5vn.com

Curriculum & Assessment 

Course Offerings & Declaring a Minor 

The Women's Studies minor is a 21 -credit hour program (7 courses). Students can use the course section search (LORA) system to find courses that are eligible for the minor.  Before declaring a Women's Studies Minor, please contact the current program chair or email wsc@big5vn.com. 

Women’s Studies Minor Assessment

Proposing a Women’s Studies Course 

Eligibility Criteria for Women’s Studies Courses: As designed by the Curriculum Committee, faculty interested in teaching a course in the Women’s Studies Program must submit to the Women’s Studies Curriculum Committee a brief narrative justifying why the course qualifies to be included as a Women's Studies course and a syllabus of the proposed course. For a course to be approved for credit in the Women’s Studies minor, it must dedicate at least 60% of the course material and assignments to discussions of women’s and gender issues. Additionally, Women’s Studies members have put together a set of eligibility criteria (included below) that interested faculty are expected to incorporate in the course objectives, course content, and student learning outcomes of the proposed course. Faculty preparing to submit a course proposal must:

2. Interested faculty members are required to submit a syllabus that shows a sustained engagement with the eligibility criteria that is further reflected in student learning outcomes (such as those demonstrated through course assignments). Faculty who wish to have their courses included in the WS minor should submit their syllabi at least a month prior to student advising/registration week.

 Eligibility Criteria:  This course will satisfy at least 5 of the following elements of the eligibility criteria. The committee, however, encourages faculty to include as many of the following criteria when designing a Women's Studies course:

____ covers issues that discuss how women’s and men’s lives are affected in gender specific ways.

____     covers issues that discuss the socio-historical experiences of women.

____     studies creative, literary and scholarly works produced by or about women.

____     explores feminist theories that ground discussions on gender equality and justice. 

____ demonstrates that gender (or even sex) is a socially constructed, hierarchical phenomenon that places emphasis on differences between women and men, and bestows unequal material and social privileges based on such differences.

____ demonstrates that social institutions, through laws or expectations governing gender-appropriate behavior, maintain and reinforce the gender binary.

____ demonstrates engagement with the role feminist and other social movements played in challenging gender as a system of inequality and privilege.

____ takes on an intersectional approach to show how gender interacts with other social statuses (ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class, religious status, and others) to create unique experiences for women and men.

____     engages in the methodologies and/or pedagogies of the field of Women’s and Gender Studies.

____     privileges women as producers of knowledge, rather than simply as subjects of study.