2024 Academic Excellence Awards: Sammie Aguirre, Julianna Goldman, & Devin Lobosco

This year, the WGSS Department selected three fabulous graduating students to receive Academic Excellence Awards: Samantha Aguirre, Julianna Goldman, & Devin Lobasco

Samantha Aguirre maintained an impressive 3.90 GPA as a double major in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. At Stony Brook, Sammie not only excelled in her coursework but also contributed to campus culture as the associate editor of The Stony Brook Press. In Spring 2024, she prepared a poster based on her WGSS Senior Research Project, “Learning Gender: The Role of Play in Early Childhood,” which was featured at the annual URECA Celebration on campus.

Julianna Goldman also maintained a near-perfect GPA of 3.98 during her time at Stony Brook. As a Psychology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies double major, she undertook both social science-based and humanities-based research. For example, her WGSS Senior Research Project analyzed gendered representations in contemporary crime dramas on US television. Since graduating, she has made time to rest, read, and swim and looks forward to pursuing a master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling in the near future.

Devin Lobosco was honored for their excellence in both Academics and Activism. Devin maintained a perfect 4.0 GPA as a double major in Biochemistry and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In addition to holding various research assistant positions on campus and beyond, they also served as the president of the Undergrad Student Government and volunteered as an EMT in Port Jefferson. Devin was a 2024 recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Academic Excellence. They are currently applying to medical school, with the goal of working as an emergency medicine physician while also advocating for more inclusive healthcare systems.

2024 Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award Winner: Francesca Petronio

The WGSS Department is delighted to introduce Francesca Petronio as the 2024 winner of the Vivien Hartog Graduate Teaching Award.

This award is named in honor of Vivien Hartog, a Women’s and Gender Studies graduate certificate student who died before she could complete her Ph.D. in Sociology. This award goes to the graduate student teacher we think best exemplifies Vivien’s lifelong commitments to activism, teaching, and learning. Here’s a description of Vivien written by her family that captures something of the kind of person we are honoring with this award:

“In Vivien Hartog’s 55 years, she went through more identities than most could imagine. An incomplete list would include: rebellious daughter; actress in training; young mother, wife (3 times); scientologist; scourge of scientology; business woman; domestic help in a hotel; undergraduate; radical feminist and lesbian; graduate student in sociology and women’s studies. At every point she both threw herself into her new identity and at the same time, remained herself. And one way that she always remained herself was in her commitment to social justice and to human rights. She remade herself regularly, but she always understood her remaking as struggles on a larger stage. Particularly in her last decade, she saw her life though the lens of an international women’s movement.”

Professor Liz Montegary (Frankie’s advisor) presented them with the award at our spring commencement ceremony. 

Frankie is a PhD candidate in WGSS working on a highly original and urgently needed dissertation about the participation of LGBTQ-identified people in far-right political movements in the United States today. Since arriving on our campus, they have impressed us with their creative and rigorous approach to research, but they have also inspired us with their passion for teaching and mentorship and their dedication to the Stony Brook community.

Frankie has taught our intro WGSS course on seven separate occasions and, in doing so, has played a key role in building our undergrad program. Their unique ability to turn a “gen ed” class into a life-changing learning experience has inspired many students to declare WGSS as their major or minor and has guided others toward career-shaping internship experiences.

This past fall, Frankie taught a special topics course on transgender media representations. This incredibly popular course attracted students from well beyond WGSS who were eager to learn more about trans studies, many of whom were trans, non-binary, or gender-nonconforming themselves. Putting into practice both mutual aid pedagogy and feminist, queer, and trans principles, Frankie created a classroom where students took care of each other while also taking pleasure in the collective work of cultural criticism.

Outside the classroom, Frankie has been an invaluable member of our campus community. In WGSS, they were elected as the graduate representative, they have served as the department mobilizer for the Graduate Student Employee Union, and they have volunteered to assist with countless departmental events. Beyond WGSS, Frankie has sought out opportunities to support students from underrepresented backgrounds across Seawolf Country through positions with the LGTBQ* Center and the Center for Inclusive Education.

In short, Frankie is a talented, generous, and hilarious teacher, mentor, and community member who more than deserves this award. Congratulations on receiving the Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Teaching!

WGSS PhD Candidate Wins President’s Award for Teaching Excellence: Lizbeth Zúñiga

This past spring, Lizbeth Zúñiga received the Graduate School’s highly competitive President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student.

The WGSS Department has known for years that Lizbeth is a fabulous teacher with an unwavering commitment to feminist pedagogy and mentoring. So, we’re absolutely thrilled to see Stony Brook recognizing Lizbeth’s excellence!

For the past two years, Lizbeth has helped us grow the WGSS major and minor by teaching a number of our gateway classes – including the WGSS survey course, the intro to queer studies course, and the introductory feminist theory course. Whether teaching online or in-person, Lizbeth excels in creating a welcoming environment.

Last fall, the students who took WST 103 with Lizbeth raved about her class in their end-of-semester evaluations. “Everything was valuable in this course,” one student reported, before adding: “everyone should take this course.” Several students commended Lizbeth for incorporating different types of texts into the syllabus and then making sure they understood how those material related to their everyday lives. One student enthusiastically declared, “I love my professor and the topics she teaches!”

Lizbeth also designed her own special topics course called “Chicanas and Latinas in Education.” The assignments for this class showcased the way Lizbeth invites students to apply what they’ve learned in creative, non-traditional ways. For example, she had students complete a “Testimonio Project,” where they were asked to “tell the story of their higher education journey” via a PowerPoint presentation. Students needed to incorporate the assigned readings as they broke down and critically reflected on their educational experiences, from their first “home-teachers” to their experiences as an undergraduate at Stony Brook. Not surprisingly, this course was a total success!

The WGSS Department cannot thank Lizbeth enough for all she does for our students, our undergrad program, and our interdisciplinary field! Congratulations on this well-deserved award!

WGSS PhD Candidate Takes 2nd Place in 3MT Challenge: Ashley Barry

On March 18, WGSS PhD Candidate Ashley Barry took 2nd place in the 2024 Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) Challenge.

Each year, the Graduate School invites doctoral students to compete in a competition designed to enhance their research and communication skills to more effectively share their work with the wider public. This spring, fifteen Stony Brook students – from across a wide range of inter/disciplines – took part in the challenge. They worked with professional development mentors to distill their dissertation projects into 3 minute presentations for a general audience, using only a single PowerPoint slide!

Ashley spoke with the Stony Brook News team about her experience:

“This experience has been fulfilling,” said Barry. “Being the only humanities participant has been really interesting because I see the fundamentals of science communication and what kind of principles I can transfer over to humanities.”

Barry said being in the humanities had both advantages and disadvantages.

People may be more familiar with the work because I study film, but getting them to see the academic rigor of it is another challenge entirely,” she said. “We’ve been working with the Alda Center and that’s been really useful to figure out the audience and rhetorical goals of conveying my research. I had to think about the research outside of the academy, how you want it to hit people, and what you want them thinking about as they leave the room.”

Read more about the competition here. Or just enjoy Ashley’s presentation below!

WGSS@SBU Awarded “Affirming Multivocal Humanities” Grant from Mellon Foundation

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.

Follow us on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) to learn more about this year’s programming!

In Support of Callen Zimmerman

This past week, WGSS graduate instructor Callen Zimmerman became the target of alarming negative media attention.

The WGSS Department expresses our collective support and deep concern for Callen Zimmerman. We are appalled by the vicious attacks being waged against them, and we condemn all forms of doxing, intimidation, and online harassment.

Callen Zimmerman is a PhD candidate in excellent standing in the WGSS Department. They are a brilliant scholar and an innovative teacher with a steadfast commitment to social justice, feminist pedagogy, and transformative knowledge production. Callen has always been and continues to be a valued and respected member of our department.

We unequivocally support the academic freedom of our graduate students, and we join the American Association of University Professors and the National Women’s Studies Association in calling on our university administrators to fully protect these freedoms on our campus. In times of war, the importance of academic freedom cannot be understated; exceptions must not be made.