Women's Studies offers a certificate for graduate students enrolled in Ph.D. Programs, although all students are welcome to take Women's Studies graduate courses. The certificate is a formal statement of the interdisciplinary coursework a student has completed, and it has proved to be a useful professional credential to students seeking positions after graduation. The student's official Duke University transcript notes the awarding of the certificate. Students who have earned the certificate have priority for the teaching and research assistant positions available through Women's Studies, and are credentialed by the Program for academic appointments in Women's Studies.

The new Graduate Curriculum was revised in 2002 with the new requirements, described below, becoming effective Fall 2003. The major intellectual impulse behind this revision relates to changes in Women's Studies as a field. In the first decades of Women's Studies as an interdiscipline, graduate curricula, where it existed, tended to be the consequence of a kind of "catch all" approach, where courses on women in various disciplines were collated to comprise a multidisciplinary Women's Studies project. As research in the field proliferated in all disciplines and as feminist theory began to have a life distinct from any individual discipline, Women's Studies scholars became concerned with a new set of questions: is Women's Studies as a field a distinct enterprise of its own? Is interdisciplinarity something more than the summation of discipline based work on women and gender? Are there specific knowledge traditions, critical vocabularies, and methodological presumptions that attach to Women's Studies as a field in its own right?

In the context of these questions, the faculty in Women's Studies at Duke began to consider what kind of intellectual training students receiving a graduate certificate needed. What did we believe constituted "training"? How would we seek to guarantee intellectual coherency and a kind of interdisciplinary expertise for students who completed a limited number of courses? What courses and in which order seemed best to develop advanced knowledge about Women's Studies scholarship, methodology, and critical paradigms? And how would competency beyond course work be defined and assessed? We were also concerned with the way that graduate students would encounter pedagogical training in the field: what experiences would they have in instruction? How would they be prepared for interdisciplinary writing, research, and teaching?

In order to prepare students to engage with the most sophisticated scholarship in Women's Studies as a field, we felt that it was necessary to create a foundations course which would serve as prerequisite to work in the certificate. We also felt that it was necessary to require the majority of courses to originate in Women's Studies. In addition, we established a set of competencies for those who wish to enroll in the Certificate Program. With these changes, we believe that we have significantly enhanced the intellectual range and depth of the certificate and that we have begun necessary changes on which future discussions of the development of the graduate program might take place. The certificate will help students articulate the core knowledge project of the field as a discrete academic enterprise AND link the study of women, genders, sexuality, race, and feminism in the disciplines together. Such is the new intellectual goal of Women's Studies nationally.

The following are requirements of the Women's Studies Certificate:

Students enrolled in the Certificate Program take four courses:

1. One required course: WST 220 Foundations in Feminist Theory
2. Two additional graduate level courses in Women's Studies at Duke.
3. Either a fourth graduate level course from Women's Studies, or a graduate course offered by another academic unit that focuses on women, gender, sexuality, race, and/or feminism (must be approved by the Program).

Certificate candidates must include women, gender, sexuality, or feminism as a significant aspect of their preliminary examination and/or dissertation project, and/or they must include a Women's Studies core, associate, adjunct, or affiliated faculty member on their preliminary examination and dissertation committees.

To help you keep track of the Certificate Requirements please feel free to download the Graduate Certificate Worksheet.


How to Apply
If you are currently a student in the Graduate School and would like to enroll in the Women's Studies Certificate Program, please complete the application (doc) and forward it to Melanie Mitchell, Program Coordinator, Box 90760.

Duke students enrolled in graduate programs at Duke outside the Graduate School and graduate interinstitutional students (UNC, NCSU, and NCCU) may enroll in the Women's Studies certificate program. Please note that no tuition charge is generated by inter-institutional students who seek the certificate and take the requisite courses under the Duke numbers.

For additional information on the Certificate Program, please contact Melanie Mitchell at 684-3655 or Director of Graduate Studies, Professor Tina M. Campt at 684-4267 (tcampt@duke.edu).

Certificate applications must be made prior to the drop/add deadlines each semester.