Spring 2027 Courses in WGSS

September 28, 2026 The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Meet the lineup of Spring 2027 courses in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Check out the list of Spring 2027 Courses coming to a schedule near you. Early Registration will open on Thursday, October 22 but students should check Testudo to make sure that they do not have any advising blocks that may prevent them from receiving their registration date. This list is subject to change. For questions, email wgss@umd.edu or make an advising appointment with Gwen Warman.

Introductory Courses

Courses in this section will apply towards the Introductory Course requirement for WGSS majors and minors. You do not need to be already enrolled in WGSS in order to take these courses.

WGSS 105: Introduction to Disability Studies

Crosslisted: AMST 289D

Jessica Lee Mathiason

Lecture: MW 2:00 - 2:15 PM

Discussion: F 1:00 - 1:50 PM or 2:00 - 2:50 PM

Online

DSHU, DVUP

Explores theories of disability justice as they intersect with feminist and antiracist struggles. Analyzing how disability has been an important aspect of institutions and social experience in the United States and beyond, the course considers how disability activists have responded to ableism by developing art, political strategies, and subcultures that promote a more just society built for a wider variety of human bodies.

WGSS/CMSC 115: Gender, Race, and Computing

Alexis Lothian and Kristina Kramarczuk

Lecture MW 10:00 - 10:50 AM in TWS 0320

Discussions F 10:00 - 10:50 AM and 11:00 - 11:50 AM (both in CSI)

Race and gender have shaped computing from its earliest histories to contemporary debates over algorithms, surveillance, and AI. We will examine how racism and sexism have operated in the development and everyday use of digital technology, while studying how feminist and racial justice movements have developed critiques and alternatives. This class is for anyone who wishes to better understand the relationships between computer science, structural power, and social justice.

LGBT 200/WGSS 201: Queer Worlds: Studies in Gender and Sexuality

Sayan Bhattacharya

Lecture MW 11-11:50 AM

Discussion: F 11:00 AM and 12:00 PM

VMH 1203

DSHS, DVUP

An interdisciplinary study of the historical and social contexts of personal, cultural and political aspects of LGBT life. Sources from a variety of fields, such as anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, and women's studies, focusing on writings by and about LGBT people.

WGSS205: Reproductive Justice

Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner

Tu/Th 9:30 - 10:45 AM or 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

SQH 4116

DSHS, DVUP

This course, taught by Dr. Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, offers an exploration of reproductive justice through the lens of Indigenous feminist epistemologies, focusing on the sacred and sovereign relationships between bodies, land, and plants. Organized around the life stages of birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, elderhood, and death, students will engage with key concepts in reproductive justice, including forced sterilization, abortion rights, family separation, eldercare, and climate justice, through an anti-colonial framework. Each week, the course integrates land-based knowledge, connecting plant medicine to reproductive decisions and care practices across life stages.

WGSS250: Gender, Art, and Culture

Shameem Razack or Lidia Garcia Berreleza

MWF 12:00 - 12:50 Pm or 1:00 - 1:50 PM

Locations Vary

DSHU, DVUP

This course provides students with a critical introduction to how art and art activism allow us to analyze and debate inequity and the practice of normativity; interrogating categories such as gender, sexuality, race, class, and ability. The course offers an opportunity to explore how artists have responded to pressing social justice issues of their times and helps us envision different ways of seeing and imagining new worlds. While the course focuses on visual art, students will also engage with genres like music, theater, literature, digital art, and performance art as platforms for social change.

Lower Level Core Courses

Courses in this section will apply towards the Lower Level Core Course requirement for WGSS majors and minors. You do not need to be already enrolled in WGSS in order to take these courses.

WGSS 115: Gender, Race, and Computing

Crosslisted: CMSC 115

Lecture: MW 10:00 - 10:50 AM TWS 0310

Discussion: Friday 11:00 - 11:50 or 12:00 - 12:50 CSI 3118

WGSS 298C: What is Care?

Will Mosley

DSHU, Big Question (SCIS)

Updated Course Time - TuTh 9:30 - 10:45

SQH 1101

This course introduces students to key concepts and debates in Care Studies, an interdisciplinary field of scholarship on care across the health sciences and humanities. We begin with the history, theory, and knowledge from communities whose bids for care are impacted by disability, ethnicity, gender, race, citizenship, and other marginalized identities. We then apply methods and frameworks from women, gender, and sexuality studies to enhance student understanding of self-care, community and self-determination in relation to care labor and care economies in their lives and around the world.

WGSS 298S: Gender and Sport

Jordan Keesler

Updated Course Time - TuTh 3:30 - 4:45 PM

SQH 1101

Students examine athletic culture as an arena where gender, race, and sexuality are simultaneously produced, policed, and contested. Drawing on feminist theory, masculinity studies, and the cultural study of sport, we ask how bodies come to matter in athletic spaces and whose bodies are celebrated, scrutinized, or excluded. Throughout this course, students will develop tools for analyzing sport as a social institution embedded in histories of colonialism, capitalism, sexism, and racism. This course will move across scales, from legal codes to bodily practices to cultural mythology to trace how gender operates through seemingly neutral rules, scientific claims, and everyday traditions. By centering figures, policies, and moments that reveal the uneven terrain of athletic life, we use sport as a lens through which to understand broader structures of power.

WGSS 265: Constructions of Manhood and Womanhood in the Black Community

Crosslisted: AAAS 265

Ashley Newby

WGSS 280: Gender & Science in Film and Media

Jessica Lee Mathiason

MW 11:00 -11:50 AM

SQH 1120 & Online (Blended)

DSHU, DVUP

Isaac Azimov once said of science fiction that it is the genre that “deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.” With this definition in mind, we will embark on a critical exploration of sci-fi film and other media, using it as a lens for analyzing society’s deepest fears and most furtive hopes. Our investigation will center on the liminal space between hegemonic culture and its prescribed excesses.
These liminal spaces—between self and other, disability and enhancement, cultural hybridization, and gender crossing—shift in response to real-world sociopolitical tensions. We will consider feminist and anti-racist media scholars’ concerns over representation, authorship and ideology alongside questions of technological change. Students will use analytical and creative assignments to explore not only how the scientific imaginary serves as fertile ground for feminist, disability, and anti-racist critique, but also provides a locus for alternative futures

WGSS 290: Bodies in Contention

Jessica Mathiason or Sydney Lewis

MW 3:30 - 4:45 PM or ESJ B0320

DSHS, DVUP, Big Question (SCIS)

Explores the contributions of feminist scholarship in framing and resolving contemporary controversies concerning gendered bodies. It includes the ways in which knowledge about the human body has been shaped by cultural ideas of gender, race, sexuality and ability.

Lower Level Elective Courses

Courses in this section will apply towards the Lower Level Elective Course requirement for WGSS majors and minors. You do not need to be already enrolled in WGSS in order to take these courses.

ARHU/WGSS 230: Introduction to Humanities, Health, and Medicine
CMLT/WGSS 275 World Literature by Women
ENGL 250/WGSS 255: Reading Women Writing
ENGL/LGBT 265: LGBTQ+ Literatures and Media
FMSC 190: Man Up! Where are the Fathers?
KNES 225: Hoop Dreams: Black Masculinity and Sport

Foundation Courses

Courses in this section will apply towards the Foundation Course requirement for WGSS majors and minors. You must be enrolled in a WGSS program in order to register for these courses. If you would like to take these courses but are not already enrolled in the program, please contact us at wgss@umd.edu to obtain permission to register.

WGSS 487: Advanced Research Seminar in Gender, Race, and Queer Studies

Upper Level Core Courses

Courses in this section will apply towards the Lower Level Elective Course requirement for WGSS majors and minors. You do not need to be already enrolled in WGSS in order to take these courses.

WGSS 302: Feminist, Race, and Queer Theory

Will Mosley

TBA

Introduces students to some of the major concepts in feminist, critical race, and queer theories. Using Black culture such as music, visual art, and performance, students will become familiar with the stakes of theories through discussion and debate. This course examines the questions: What is theory? What forms does theory take? What is the relationship between theory and practice? What is the role of theory in political and social action? In art? In personal life? What does it mean to do theory?

LGBT 310: Transgender Studies

Sayan Bhattacharya

MW 3:30-4:45

SQH 1101

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies, providing a history of the field and engaging current debates within it. Transgender Studies has produced the most cutting-edge scholarship that has not only transformed the very way we imagine gender but it has also deepened our understanding of race, class, sexuality, ability and various modes of structural oppression. Transgender movements across the world are resisting oppressive states and are also intrinsic participants in various struggles for justice. In this course, we will be reading the most recent scholarship in Transgender Studies both from the US as well as transnationally. There will be opportunities to read poetry, watch films and interact with guest speakers as well.

WGSS 319C: Gender, Drag, and Burlesque

Sydney Lewis

TuTh 4:30-5:45

SQH 1121

Explore how historically and currently drag and burlesque construct and reconstruct gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies. We will interrogate ways that the art forms both subverts and re-establishes prevailing bodily norms. We will also grapple with the complex relationship between the art forms and "feminist" practices thinking about if, when, where, and how "power" can be exercised through performance.

WGSS 319F: Queer Fandom Studies

Alexis Lothian

Crosslisted: CINE 369F

MW 2:00 - 3:15 PM

SQH 1121

As a source of shared feeling, creative community, and collective action, fandom is a significant force in culture and politics. This course will explore the varied and ambiguous intersections of fandom with race, gender, and sexuality, centering on the contemporary US media landscape and how we arrived here. Students’ particular fandom interests will shape the course of our collective study as well as providing material for research and creative projects.

LGBT/WGSS 475: Magical Black Femmes: Queering Black Femininities

Sydney Lewis

F 11:00 - 1:50 PM

SQH 4116

Students will use cultural studies and arts and humanities approaches in order to grapple with the messy magic of black femme identity as a radical critique of sexuality, whiteness, gender and intersecting categories of oppression. The messiness of "femme" is revealed when each of those terms is put into question. Who or what constitutes queer? What constitutes feminine? How does one present feminine; is that merely an aesthetic choice? Does one have to be a woman to be feminine? For black femmes, whose femininity has been circumscribed and defined not only against butchness but also against white femininity, claiming "femme" can be a means to turn that "messiness" into "magic."

Upper Level Elective Courses

Courses in this section will apply towards the Lower Level Elective Course requirement for WGSS majors and minors. You do not need to be already enrolled in WGSS in order to take these courses, however special permission may be required from other departments from some courses listed here.

AAAS 398G: Gender, Labor, and Racial Identities in Diaspora Communities
AAAS 398U/ENGL 368F/WGSS 379U: Angela Davis
AAST/WGSS 422: Asian American Women and Gender
ANTH 403: Queer Anthropology
COMM 324: Communication and Gender
FMSC 310: Maternal Child and Family Health
HESI 422: Women and Leadership
HLTH 377: Human Sexuality
HLTH/WGSS 471: Women's Health
PSYC/WGSS 336: Psychology of Women
PSYC 354: Multicultural Psychology in the US
SOCY 335: Sociology of Health and Illness
SOCY 435: Society, Biology, and Health
SOCY 470: Pregnancy and Perenthood in an Unequal Society