AMST 302: Immigrants in American Society
Dr. Laura Zarrugh
W 2:30-5 / Miller 2160
Immigrants today come to America from many countries, but because scholarly research has tended to concentrate on only a few of the largest nationality groups, the full range of immigrant experience has yet to be explored and documented. In this cross-disciplinary course, we will give special attention to two groups, Mexicans and Vietnamese, about whom much has been written, as examples of the varying ways that immigrants come to the U.S. and adapt to living here while maintaining important ties to their homelands and cultures. We will also consider the consequences of immigration for both the first and second generations of immigrants as well as for the communities that receive them, including the Central Shenandoah Valley. 
Women’s Studies Minors may substitute this course as one of their five electives if they choose to write the term paper on the immigrant experience of women in the United States.

ENG 327: The Gothic:  Sexuality and Terror in 18th and 19th-Century British Fiction
Dr. Katey Castellano
MW 5-6:15 / Keezell 310
Beginning with Walpole’s “classic” Gothic story, The Castle of Otranto, this course will question why the Gothic’s monsters and specters haunt modernity’s Enlightenment rationality and socio-economic “progress.”  Gothic writers were called “terrorists,” and their works often imagine that a racialized or sexualized “Other” threatens the moral and physical boundaries of the proper British citizen.  The alternate attraction to and repulsion from the racial or sexual “Other,” in William Beckford’s Asiatic tale Vathek, E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman,” John Polidori’s The Vampyre, and James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, produces uncanny alter-egos, or “doppelgangers.”  At the same time, women writers adopt the “terror” of the Gothic for their own purposes: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are “female gothic” texts that identify unspeakable, violent crimes and sexual desires and, moreover, question the nature of reality as it is posed in the masculine world of science.  Finally, we will read later 19th-century texts from male writers, including Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  These texts insist that the terrifying “Other” already exists within national and even bodily boundaries, a theme that allows for confessions of fin-de-siècle decadence, including opium addiction and “deviant” sexual practices. Our readings of these primary texts will be supplemented by feminist, economic, post-colonial, and queer theoretical readings of the novels. 

ENG 368/WSMT 368: Women’s Narratives of Development and Discovery
Dr. Mary Thompson
MW 5:00-6:15 p.m. / Keezell G008
This course explores the themes of coming of age and self-discovery in the fiction of 20th century American women writers.  We will explore the construction of women’s identities across issues of race, social class, sexuality, and place.

ENG 466/WMST 466: Studies in Women’s Literature
Dr. Sandra Duvivier
MWF 12:20-1:10 / Keezell G003
This interdisciplinary course examines selected transnational black American women’s fiction and investigates the multiplicity of cultural, racial, gender, sexual, and/or migratory experiences that has shaped it.  In addition to exploring what constitutes “transnational black American-ness,” we will analyze, among other things, how selected authors (Morrison, Marshall, Naylor, Kincaid, Danticat, Adisa, et al.) gender, politicize, and problematize notions of identity and “home” in their writings.  Furthermore, we will explore the ways in which these writers’ fiction not only complicates and expands the very meaning of “blackness” and “American-ness,” but also disrupts traditional boundaries “governing” racial, ethnic, and/or national identity in the United States.
Prerequisite: ENG 367 or ENG 368.

JUSTICE/WMST 341: Gender and Justice
Dr. Sue E. Spivey
Tuesdays 3:30-6 p.m. / Maury G1
This course is an interdisciplinary examination of the causes, structure and consequences of gender oppression. Consistent with the social justice track of the major, notions of fairness, justice, and equality with respect to gendered social, political and economic relations will be examined. Particular emphasis will be granted on similarities and diversities across race, ethnicity, class and sexuality within the US, although international comparisons will be addressed.

PSYC 310: The Psychology of Women and Gender
Dr. Arnie Kahn
TTh 2:00-3:15 / Miller 2106
An examination of research and theory regarding the abilities and behaviors of women and the changing roles of women. Consideration is given to biological, developmental and societal determinants of sex and gender. Prerequisites: GPSYC 101 and junior status.

REL 315: Women and Religion
Dr. Sallie King / TTh 11-12:15
Study of women and world religions, historically and today, emphasizing Buddhism, religions of China and Japan, Judaism and Christianity. The variety of women’s religious roles and practices are studied in a comparative context. Feminist scholarship’s proposals for revising our understanding of religious history and reforming religious traditions.

SOCI 337. Sociology of Gender
Dr. Bethany Bryson
TTh 2-3:15 / Burruss 44
Examination of theories of sex role development, the roles of men and women in society and gender as a social construction

WMST 300: American Indian Women Writers
Karen Evans
W 2:30-5:00 / HHS 0208
American Indian Women Writers is an introduction to contemporary American Indian literature and the oral tradition.  Until 1968, only nine novels by Native American authors had been published. In 1969, Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for _House Made of Dawn_.  In the 1970s an American Indian literary renaissance began as American Indian women writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen and Louise Erdrich set out to revise the stereotypical images of themselves and to establish their own identity.