The Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) program, which began at Washington University in 1972, has been granted departmental status. Professor Mary Ann Dzuback, who was previously the director of the WGGS program, has been appointed as the chair of the new department.

Dzuback said that one of the most important aspects of departmental status is that it allows WGSS to better control its growth through both faculty hiring and curriculum development, functions which it could not access as a program.

“We can request support for faculty searches, and we can conduct those searches ourselves and determine who is hired to the department,” Dzuback said.

In the past, these searches had to be conducted through other departments.

“Joint appointments usually require cooperation with the department which can become the faculty member’s tenure home,” Dzuback said.

In this scenario, a hired faculty member may teach in WGSS, but still be housed within another department.

“We didn’t really have control over those searches,” Dzubach said. “It was department priorities that determined whether a search would be expected and whether a…candidate was hired.”

In a press release, Dzuback said that she is looking to use the department’s new resources to fill out some of the areas where she feels the department is still lacking.

“We could do more to address developments in trans and transnational studies, particularly from the perspective of the social sciences,” Dzuback said.

The department is also looking at expanding its graduate studies and forming joint programs with other departments in order to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the WGSS.

While Dzuback said that all of these changes are significant, she joked that most students won’t see an immediate difference in how the department operates.

“A lot of students already think we’re a department,” Dzuback said. “The impact it will have is over the somewhat longer term, when students are exposed to the newest developments in the field, because we’re able to control how we grow and what directions we take.”

Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences Barbara Schaal said that the change to departmental status will take effect immediately, but that some of the logistics are still being worked out.

“We’re talking about how do we assign faculty to the department, but all of that is going to be worked out in a very gentle and carefully thought out way,” Schaal said.

Departmental status will allow for more faculty to be housed within WGSS, but Schaal said that it has yet to be determined which, if any, current faculty members will move into the department.

More broadly, the WGSS department signifies what Dzuback called the University’s “long-term commitment” to the discipline of WGSS. Schaal echoed Dzuback, saying the change acknowledges the large level of support that WGSS has at the University. The department currently houses eight core faculty, as well as over 40 affiliated faculty members. In addition, there are over 60 undergraduate majors, over 30 minors and 31 graduate students within the department.

According to the press release, one of the keys to the WGSS department’s new status was an external review in 2006—the same year Dzuback became director.

“It was a fantastic experience,” Dzuback said of the review. “It gave us a good grasp of who we are as a program, of where we stand in relation to peer institutions and of what we have to offer. It helped us to get our house in order, and to start thinking about ways of moving forward.”

In the press release, Provost Holden Thorp noted the significance of WGSS in the field of humanities as a whole.

“The research, scholarship and insights emerging from the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies have the potential to profoundly shape how we, as a culture, think about and discuss identity in the 21st century,” Thorp said.

Whether or not the WGSS departmental status will have any effect on the status of similarly interdisciplinary studies such as the Program in African and African-American Studies or the American Culture Studies program has yet to be determined.

“There are many programs for example that do not want to become departments, because they are so truly interdisciplinary and it’s kind of creating something new where it is a mixture of a number of different disciplines,” Schaal said. “On the other hand, you can see in cases where there is a program and it develops into a very vibrant field that there ultimately could be a department.”