Georgia State University Institute for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies records

Founded in 1994 as the Women's Studies Institute, the Institute for Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Georgia State University has played integral roles in creating knowledge about the workings of gender in social, political, and economic spheres locally and globally, contributing to the intellectual development of feminists in Atlanta and the world. As WGSS has grown to include five core faculty and over forty affiliate faculty across the University, it has developed a depth of expertise in the interrelated areas of sexuality studies, social change, and globalization. They have also developed wide-ranging expertise in an array of fields, from British literature to criminal justice, media studies to social work, and religious studies to educational studies.

The Institute for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies was realized after 20 years of dedicated struggle by a group of faculty committed to the project of establishing WGSS at Georgia State University. Among this group were its first two Directors. The founding Director, Diane L. Fowlkes, led the development of the Master's of Arts in 1995. Since that time, WGSS master's graduates have continued on to prestigious doctoral programs, law school, non-profit work, and careers in government and private industry.

Though students had developed undergraduate concentrations in WGSS since 1984, the Institute's second Director, Linda A. Bell, led the establishment of the Bachelor of Arts in 2003, enabling WGSS to offer an undergraduate major and minor. With demand for the knowledge and critical thinking women's, gender, and sexuality studies offers, the program has created significant relationships not only with local feminist organizations, academics, and activists but also with feminists in universities, non-governmental organizations, arts and cultural alliances, and communities around the world. The Institute for Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies is recognized as a site for cutting-edge theoretical analyses and applications of feminist and womanist knowledges.

Around the period of WGSS's inception in 1995, Georgia State University also became the home for the Georgia Women's Movement Project. GSU publicly announced that the initial goal of the project was to preserve the history of the second U.S. women's movement in Georgia (1964-1982) through the development of the Donna Novak Coles Women's Movement Archives and the Lucy Hargrett Draper U.S. Equal Rights Amendment Collection (1923-1982), while continuing to study and pursue equality and progress through the Women's Movement Program in the Women's Studies Institute. This collaboration between the Unviersity Library and the Women's Studies Institute flourished to include of 40 collections in the ever-expanding Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives and more than 50 oral histories in the Georgia Women's Movement Oral History Project.