Several students have organized an Undergraduate Working Group for Queer Studies to advocate for more academic offerings dealing with queer issues.
The group - part of the Queer Alliance - held its first meeting on Jan. 30. Michael DeLucia '07, the group's founder, said the group is currently focused on gathering student support and assessing student interest in the field of queer academics and will later advocate for those offerings.
"We want to reach out to the students - you know, we sort of have a hunch that there are queer students on this campus who want there to be more LGBT-related classes, and so now our job is to go out there and prove that there are those students and show that there is a demand for those courses, and then once that demand has been demonstrated to exist, we're going to be more focused on the issue of gaining faculty support," he said.
DeLucia said the group wants more courses about queer issues to be offered and more professors specializing in those fields to be hired. The ultimate goal is to establish an undergraduate concentration in queer studies, according to Robert Smith '09, the chair of the Queer Political Action Committee, which has been working with the undergraduate working group on the issue.
"We're starting to reach out to departments, hoping that they will bring scholars to campus who specialize in queer studies, with the long-term goal of having a queer studies concentration," Smith said. DeLucia said the process of bringing more queer academic offerings to Brown could take a long time.
The lack of faculty involved in queer studies has played a role in the lack of course offerings. "I can say that as a graduate student who writes about the history of sexuality in America, it's really difficult for me to find people to work with here," said Evangelia Mazaris GS, who teaches AC 19 Sec.5: "Queer Public Histories." She said she is not involved with the student group.
"There's a real intellectually valid reason for wanting to study this, and I think that having a queer studies program that's supported and that the University is really proud of and invests in gives Brown an opportunity to really be a leader in this field, and I think in the long run would really pay off for the University," Mazaris said.
But the paucity of offerings in the field may simply reflect a lack of student interest, said James Green, associate professor of history, who advises the Gender and Sexuality program. He said attendance at queer studies courses offered in the past has been low.
"This is a market-driven university." he said, "Students vote with their feet on the classes."
The concentration in Sexuality and Society merged with the Gender Studies program this fall to create Gender and Sexuality Studies, a new interdisciplinary concentration, according to the Web site of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.
While the Gender and Sexuality Studies program offers several courses in queer studies, there are no faculty exclusively dedicated to studying and teaching queer issues, according to Mazaris. Green said only a few students concentrating in Gender and Sexuality have expressed interest in queer studies.
Though the departments may give faculty discretion in the classes they teach, the faculty themselves are limited by their academic experience. "If students came and asked for the class, then I would definitely think about teaching it," Green said. But, he noted, his primary focus is on Latin American history, not queer studies.
