The Center for the Study of Women and Society

01/05/2026

The Center for the Study of Women and Society is still accepting applications for our 2025-2026 awards! For more details on the Koonja Mitchell Memorial Prize and the Sue Rosenberg Zalk Award, see the posters below and our website: bit.ly/WGSAWARDS

11/12/2025

Please join the Society for the Study of Women in Renaissance for their upcoming webinar on Thursday, November 20 from 6-730 PM on Zoom! Georgianna Ziegler will be reflecting on her experience writing a biography on Esther Inglis (1570-1624).

More information and RSVP Here:

Esther Inglis, 1570-1624: Recreating a Renaissance Life – Zoom, Thu Nov 20, 2025 - Join us for a writer's meditation on what it has been like to spend the past five years with Esther Inglis, after knowing about her for over thirty years, as Georgianna Ziegler has been writing her biography. During...

11/12/2025

Please join us on Friday, November 21 from 5-6PM on Zoom for a book talk with Char Adams, ‘21 Alumna from the CUNY Graduate Center’s Women’s and Gender Studies M.A. Program!!

More information and RSVP Here:

Book Talk: Black Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore – Zoom, Fri Nov 21, 2025 - Join us Friday, November 21st at 5pm for a book talk with Women and Gender Studies MA Alumna '20, Char Adams! She will discuss her new forthcoming title, Black Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Bl.....

09/18/2025

Grace Cho, who founded the Koonja Mitchell Memorial Prize in honor of her mother is less than $500 from her fundraising goal! Donate here so we can continue to support CUNY Graduate Students doing amazing work: givegab.com/campaigns/koonja-mitchell-memorial-prize

Join me in giving to The Graduate Center's campaign Koonja Mitchell Memorial Prize

09/11/2025

Please join the Women’s and Gender Studies M.A. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center for our open house on Thursday, September 25 at 630PM EST on Zoom!

Join us to hear from our students, faculty, and staff and ask any questions you might have!

Register here:

We welcome prospective students to the MA Program in Women's and Gender Studies Open House to meet with current students, faculty members, and the director to discuss the program. This event is free and open to the public. Thursday, September 25th, 2025 6:30 PM EASTERN TIME ONLINE ONLY - Zoom link w...

05/14/2025

The Center for the Study of Women and Society is pleased to announce the winners of two of our annual awards!

Congrats to Maricarmen Canales-Moreno (pictured on the right), who was awarded the Koonja Mithcell Memorial Prize for her project, "From Dictatorship to Democracy: Women's Resistance and Gendered Struggles in Authoritarian Chile and Argentina" and to Maddie Schindele (pictured on the left), who was awarded the Sue Rosenberg Zalk Endowed Fund Award for her project "Shadows and Schmerzenskind: In/Fertility in Early 20th Century German Opera"

04/11/2025

Please join the Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance for a talk with Shannon McHugh next Thursday, April 17, at 6 pm on Zoom.

The Questione della Laura: Speech and Historicity in Petrarch’s Lyric
April 17, 6-7:30 pm
RSVP: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/centerforthestudyofwomenandsociety/1554153?

Modern readings of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta tend to emphasize silence and violence in the poet’s (mis)treatment of the beloved. But early modern readers seem to have read Laura differently. This is evident in the most popular sixteenth-century edition of Petrarch’s lyric, edited by Alessandro Vellutello in 1525, which treats Laura as a historical, intelligent, and highly verbal subject. In this talk, Shannon McHugh draws on her recent book, Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), as well as on new research to get closest to the way that early modern readers experienced Laura.
Shannon McHugh is Assistant Director of Research at The Huntington Library. She is a scholar of early modern Italian and French literature and gender and the author of Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy (Amsterdam UP, 2023).

Modern readings of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta tend to emphasize silence and violence in the poet’s (mis)treatment of ...

03/11/2025

The Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance is hosting their next webinar in two weeks!

Please join on Zoom on Thursday, March 27 6:00 - 7:30 PM EST for "Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives: Imaging Women of Consequences in the Dutch Golden Age" with Martha Moffitt Peacock.

For more details, and to RSVP, visit here:

In Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives, Martha Moffitt Peacock provides a novel interpretive approach to the artistic practice of...

03/10/2025

The Center for the Study of Women and Society is pleased that we have been able to facilitate the awarding of Koonja Mitchell Memorial Prize every year since its establishment in 2008 by Grace Cho.

Each year, the prize honors an outstanding doctoral student in any discipline, whose work is concerned with issues of social justice. Past recipients have written dissertations on topics such as the militarized repression of indigenous people in Canada, solidarity work in migrant justice organizing, memorializing Argentina’s disappeared, over-policing in the South Bronx, New Orleans’ cultural history of slavery and violence, and peacebuilding through participatory archives. These projects should give us all hope for a more just future.

These are what just a few past winners have had to say about the impact of the Koonja Mitchell Memorial Prize:

"This prize provided valuable recognition of how my work can support women's history. It helped me gain confidence to converse with that field." - Madeline Lafuse, "Poison in Marie Laveau’s New Orleans: A Cultural History of Slavery and Violence, 1769-1900" (2022)

"Drafting the application for the prize pushed me to think deeply about how I'm introducing my work to people unfamiliar with my theoretical frameworks and methods" - Jennifer Queenan "'The Struggle for Justice Does Not End When the School Bell Rings:' Radical Educator Collectives and Social Movement Strategy"(2024)

"Winning the award has of course supported archival research, but perhaps more importantly has kept me honest, compelling me to keep issues of violence, trauma, and justice central to my treatment of the topic" - "Tar and Feathers: Colonial Culture and the Making of Patriot Violence" Arinn Amer (2019).

For most of the prize's existence, Grace Cho has independently funded the award. This year she is fundraising to help the award, and her mother's memory, remain alive. You can donate and learn more about the prize here!

Join me in giving to The Graduate Center's campaign Koonja Mitchell Memorial Prize

03/10/2025

We are pleased to host filmmaker Bernardita Llanos for a screening of her film La Chispa En La Pradera, followed by a Q&A. Please join us on Wednesday March 26 6:00 - 7:00 PM in the Segal Theatre of the CUNY Graduate Center.

For more details and to RSVP: https://buytickets.at/centerforthestudyofwomenandsociety/1570117

This event is co-sponsored with the CUNY Film and Media Cultures concentration (MALS).

Please join the Center for the Study of Women and Society for screening of the documentary La Chispa En La Pradera, a documenta...

02/20/2025

We are pleased to be hosting Evelynn Hammonds and Christa Kuljian in coversation about Kuljian’s book Our Science Ourselves on Thursday, March 20 6-7:30 PM EST at the CUNY Graduate Center (Room 9205).

More information and registration here: https://bit.ly/ourscienceourselves

Our Science Ourselves tells the story of a trailblazing network of women scientists in the Boston area in the 1970s, 80s and 90s including Hammonds, Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Banu Subramaniam. Inspired by the social and political activism of the women’s movement, and organizations like Science for the People and the Combahee River Collective, they began to develop feminist and anti-racist critiques of science. The book tells the origin story of feminist science studies, and also illustrates how engaging with these critiques is often difficult for many women scientists, including Nancy Hopkins, initially a “reluctant feminist.”

This event is co-sponsored by the The Public Science Project, The Center for the Humanities, and the CUNY Graduate Center's History and Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies departments.

Evelynn Hammonds and Christa Kuljian will be in conversation about Kuljian’s book Our Science Ourselves, which tells the story ...

02/04/2025

The Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance (SSWR) and the Center for the Study of Women and Society (CSWS) are pleased to present Emily Wilbourne "Mozart’s Sister, Cavalli’s Wife: Musical Women, the Family, and Biographical Narratives"

Please join us on Thursday February 20, from 6 - 7:30 at the CUNY Graduate Center Room 9207 or on Zoom.

To RSVP, and for more details, check here:

Questions of gender and of individual talent (such as musical talent) highlight a tension within biographical writing between l...