News & Events
Events
Follow the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies on or for event postings. Virtual events will be held in Microsoft Teams, which is available for use in your web browser or can be . Past department events can be viewed on out Past Events page.
Disability Accommodations: If you require a reasonable accommodation to participate in a Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies event, please contact 813-974-0982 at least five (5) working days prior to the event.
Feminist Coffee Hours
September 29, October 27, & November 24, 2025
Hybrid Event
USF faculty and staff are invited to join us for our fall series of Feminist Coffee Hours. Email us to RSVP and receive time and location information.
WGSS Brown Bag Series Talk: Shaunesse' Jacobs Plaisimond: "The Importance of Reclaiming a Religiously Informed Concept of Personhood in Healthcare for Black Birthing People"
October 22, 2025, 12:30-2:00pm
Location: CMC202T and Teams
The U.S. healthcare system continues to operate within an antiquated biomedical framework. This framework excludes many components of patients鈥� humanity, including their spirituality and culture. By expanding the biomedical model to a biopsychosocial model that centers personhood, patients can be engaged as whole persons in the healthcare encounter. Such a pivot is especially critical for marginalized communities like black birthing people who statistically have worse health outcomes for themselves and their children than their racial/ethnic peers.
Integrating a concept of personhood rooted in human dignity and the theological concept of the imago dei into healthcare recognizes the multiple dimensions of care vulnerable and marginalized communities most need.
Shaunesse鈥� Jacobs Plaisimond is Assistant Professor of Religion and Health, and Affiliate Faculty in WGSS at USF. Her research uses religious and feminist ethics to reevaluate ways to reform clinical encounters between marginalized patients and providers to improve individual and communal health outcomes. Her specific community of focus are black birthing people.
If you would like to attend this event remotely via Teams, email us for the meeting link, and specify you are RSVPing for the Brown Bag event.
Transnational Care Book Club Events: Lecture and Workshop
November 3, Lecture: Indigenous Writers, Soviet Spaces: Notes on Reading and Relation in the Contact Zone with Dr. Naomi Caffee
November 7, Beyond Borders Collaborative Workshop
Join us in making the archive speak again 鈥� across languages, across borders, across time.
What happens when a Black feminist poet from Harlem crosses paths鈥攁cross continents and languages鈥攚ith an Indigenous Chukchi writer from the Russian Far East in 1976? What new worlds of care, creativity, and solidarity open up when we bring their encounter into conversation today?
This two-part event series is a playground for curious minds and bold creators: students, artists, thinkers, and community members from all disciplines are invited to dive into topics often left out of textbooks, including Indigenous feminism, Black feminism, digital humanities, transnational solidarity, and Eurasian studies. You鈥檒l explore the intersections of political thought, creative writing, and cultural translation, experiment with new forms of expression, and map distant geographies and diverse lived experiences in a hands-on, collaborative environment.
This is your chance to read, write, imagine, and create across borders鈥攁nd leave with work that amplifies voices too often overlooked.
To learn more about these events and to RSVP, visit the Beyond Borders site.
Proposals Workshop for the Present Tense / Future Possibilities Conference
November 4, 2025, 12:30-1:30pm
Virtual (Teams)
We will be hosting a virtual workshop on how to write a conference proposal for anyone interested in submitting a proposal for the Present Tense / Future Possibilites Conference. This will be tailored to undergrad and graduate students who haven't submitted for a conference before, but it is open to anyone looking to brush up on the conference proposal skills.
RSVP required to receive workshop link.
Gather and Grow: WGSS Pop-up Undergrad Open House
December 2, 2025, 3:30-5:30pm
CMC202
Join us for a relaxed, welcoming space to connect with WGSS faculty and fellow students. Reflect on the semester, share your thoughts and memories, and celebrate our community鈥攑izza included! Drop by for as long as you can鈥攅veryone鈥檚 welcome!
WGSS Brown Bag Series Talk: Fae Chubin's "Proper Women: Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in Iran"
January 27, 2026, 12:30-2:00pm
Hybrid event: CMC 202T & Teams
Fae Chubin will discuss her recently published book about the transnational activism of Iranian feminists. By telling the unprecedented story of an NGO-led women鈥檚 empowerment program in Tehran, she demonstrates the entanglement of class and ethnic discourses of respectability with Iran鈥檚 middle-class feminism. Chubin鈥檚 book delineates the well-intentioned efforts of cosmopolitan NGO administrators whose loyalty to liberal feminist principles of individualism, sexual autonomy, and anti-traditionalism had complicated their objective of empowering marginalized women.
Fae Chubin is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Sociology at the University of Tampa. Her research explores gender, race, class, identity politics, border and immigration discourses, and the resistance of subaltern women. Her book Proper Women: Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in Iran examines the class and ethnic discourses of respectability entangled with Iran鈥檚 middle-class feminism.
Chubin鈥檚 work has been published in the peer-reviewed journals Sexualities, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Women鈥檚 Studies International Forum, the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, and Sociological Inquiry. Her most recent work on genital surgeries and the commodification of female genitalia was published this year in the edited volume Consuming Bodies: Body Commodification and Embodiment in Late Capitalist Societies.
If you would like to attend this event remotely via Teams, email us for the meeting link, and specify you are RSVPing for the Brown Bag event.
WGSS 4th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference: Present Tense / Future Possibilities
February 13, 2026
USF Tampa Campus - MSC 3rd Floor
For more information and the call for proposals, visit the conference page.
The deadline for conference proposals is December 12, 2025.
The Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies celebrated its 50th anniversary during the 2022-2023 academic year. Visit our 50th Anniversary page, to view more information about the 50th Anniversary Events.