The Women and Gender Studies program offers a particular focus on feminist colonial, post-colonial, diasporic and transnational studies.  The program supports diverse and multidisciplinary graduate research querying gendered, raced, sexed and queered subjects as they are entangled in political economies and cultural formations.  In particular, the University of Toronto’s Women and Gender Studies Institute (WGSI) has distinctive strengths in the following four areas: 1) gender, sexuality and queer studies; 2) feminist cultural studies; 3) feminist studies of technology, science, environment and biomedicine; and 4) transnational political economy and critical development studies. Our core faculty brings transnational feminist commitments to the study of diverse sites and their interconnection with particular focus on Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, South East Asia, East Asia, and the United States.

The objective of this PhD program is to prepare gender and feminist analysts who can systematically bring together scholarship across disciplines to address ongoing and emergent concerns in innovative and boundary-breaking ways. This is achieved through a combination of coursework and research training leading to a doctoral dissertation embodying original research.