The WGSS Department was awarded a $100,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation’s “Affirming Multivocal Humanities” program. This award will support WGSS program-building activities during the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years.

The “Affirming Multivocal Humanities” program is a component of the Mellon Foundation’s Higher Learning initiative, which seeks to elevate humanities knowledge that lays the foundation for more just and equitable futures. The Mellon Foundation understands the study of race, gender, and sexuality to be crucial to this objective, particularly at this pivotal moment in US history. Indeed, research and teaching in these fields epitomizes the essential exercise of academic freedom within US higher education. In recognition of this fact, Mellon’s Higher Learning initiative offered grants of $100,000 to gender/sexuality and race/ethnic studies programs and department at public colleges and universities across the country.

WGSS@SBU requested funding from the “Affirming Multivocal Humanities” program to support our ongoing efforts to protect academic freedom on our campus and across the SUNY system. To this end, our department is undertaking two distinct-yet-related projects:

Building a SUNY-wide Network of Gender/Sexuality Studies Programs & Departments. We are organizing a series of meetings and workshops with gender/sexuality studies representatives from 20 SUNY campuses across the fall and spring semesters this year. We believe our field will be better equipped to respond to the challenges facing New York public universities if our programs and departments are working in synchrony with one another. Our hope is to establish communication across our campuses and to lay the groundwork needed for launching future research, teaching, program-building, and community-based collaborations.

Protecting Academic Freedom, Advancing Social Justice. We are working closely with the Center for Changing Systems of Power, the Humanities Institute, and colleagues from our allied departments to develop programming about the threats to intersectional, interdisciplinary research and teaching at this historical moment. Last year, we helped organize a panel discussion about the attacks on DEI and gender studies in Florida; a workshop with Faculty First Responders on how higher ed workers can protect themselves from online attacks; and two teach-ins: one about peace and human rights activism in and beyond the academy, and a second about the SUNY system’s reliance on the unfreedoms of prison labor to create spaces of academic freedom.

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