Ellie Park, Multimedia Managing Editor

The Program on Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, or WGSS, has entered the final stages of the hiring process for an Assistant Professor in Transgender Studies. The chosen candidate will be Yale’s first faculty member focusing exclusively on trans studies and is expected to begin teaching in the fall.

“WGSS faculty members have been discussing for a number of years the possibility of a trans studies hire to match the directions of our field and the interests in our student body,” Roderick Ferguson, chair of the WGSS department, wrote to the News.

Currently, 12 faculty members teach full-time within the department, a number that has tripled in the last 15 years. Each term, WGSS enrolls over 500 undergraduate students across a broad range of major interests in its classes.

According to Igor de Souza, director of undergraduate studies for WGSS, students and faculty members alike have expressed a need for a specialist in trans studies.

“WGSS lacks somebody who is thinking about transness full-time, doing work on transness and pushing the boundaries of how we conceive of gender, of gender relations, of gender and sexuality,” de Souza said. “And transness is such an integral part of how we understand gender, how we live and practice gender, in the sense that it calls all of us to think about how we fall in transness.”

The department currently offers several courses focusing on trans studies, such as “Gender and Transgender,” an introductory course taught by Greta LaFleur, and “Gender Expression before Modernity,” taught by de Souza. 

Margaret Homans, professor of English and WGSS, teaches “Fiction and Sexual Politics,” a course which covers the trans experience as portrayed in literature.

“I’m thrilled that WGSS has hired a specialist in the field to start at Yale next year,” Homans wrote to the News. “It would be great to see more trans related courses all over the catalogue.”

The department, which listed the position last fall, is nearing the end of the process of choosing a final candidate for the new assistant professorship, and is currently vetting a short list of applicants.

According to de Souza, WGSS has opened up the role in order to offer more courses concerning transness not only historically, but also in the context of other related fields. These fields include  the performing arts and the sciences.

“I really imagine this position as sort of doing a transness of the present. So, dealing with topics in contemporary discourse, and performance in the arts,” de Souza said. “Transness and performance, transness in politics, transness and science would be another aspect of that.”

The growth of the WGSS department has also allowed it to become better equipped to welcome early career scholars into roles such as the Transgender Studies professorship, as opposed to more senior, tenured professors. 

Yet even as the department seeks to expand its curriculum and as the hiring process for the new professorship has progressed, the intellectual climate in which the department operates has become one of “fear,” according to de Souza.

“We have some troubling developments in other states at the level of public universities and WGSS departments being curtailed or closed. Courses being sort of stricken off the books,” de Souza said. “ I don’t anticipate that happening here. But the federal administration has levers that they can pull to pressure Yale to move to a certain direction.”

The federal threat to remove scientific funding, for example, impacts the resources available for departments such as WGSS. 

Still, de Souza expressed an unrelenting commitment not just to the department’s continuing operations, but to its flourishing and growth. The assistant professorship in Transgender Studies is only one of several positions that WGSS is looking to fill in the fall. These include openings for lecturers and postdoctoral researchers.

“I think that it’s really important, in line with what [Yale history professor] Tim Snyder has argued, that we don’t silence ourselves preemptively and we don’t obey preemptively. So we are proceeding as normal, as in we are offering the courses that we have always offered. We are still reading the same texts and discussing the same ideas that we always have,” said de Souza. “We are going to keep doing our work that is so vital for us, that has touched the lives of so many students.”

The Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies was established in 1979 as the Women’s Studies program.