Tuesday, April 14, 2026

3:30 - 5:00 PM

Sojourner Truth Commons

300 O'Shaughnessy Hall

The Genevieve D. Willis Senior Thesis Award recognizes the best thesis written by an undergraduate at Notre Dame on a topic related to gender and/or sexuality studies and includes a cash award of $200. This prize is named in honor of Genevieve D. Willis, whose family has provided an endowment for the Gender Studies Program.

The winning submission will be an academic thesis of at least 25 pages in length that addresses issues pertaining to gender and/or sexuality studies and was completed during the current academic year. The winning thesis will demonstrate advanced, original academic research in this field. Stylistically, the winning thesis will conform to the expectations of academic research and writing at the advanced undergraduate level.

The Philip L. Quinn Essay Award recognizes the best academic essay written by an undergraduate at Notre Dame on a topic related to gender and/or sexuality studies and includes a cash award of $200. This prize is named in honor of Professor Philip L. Quinn (1940-2004), who taught in the Notre Dame Philosophy Department for many years and was a generous supporter of the Gender Studies Program.

The winning submission will be an academic essay written by an undergraduate for a course taken at the University of Notre Dame or a Gender Studies senior capstone essay. The essay may take the form of a research paper but cannot be a senior thesis. It must address issues pertaining to gender and/or sexuality studies. Gender studies analyzes the significance of gender—and cognate subjects such as sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and nation—in all areas of life, especially in the social formation of human identities, practices, and institutions. The winning essay will demonstrate advanced work in this field. It will also have a logical structure, clear language, and a well-supported argument.

Deadline extended:
The deadline for submissions has been extended to noon/12:00 PM EST on Friday, April 10, 2026.  See the Awards page under Student Opportunities on the Gender Studies Website to submit your senior thesis or your academic essay using the corresponding link on that page.

Please consider this exciting CFP for the ND Queer Studies Symposium. We'll be coordinating this conference with the GS Grad Research Workshop: participation as either a presenter or an audience member will count toward your GS requirements. The Queer Studies Symposium, titled "(Dis)appearance", will be held on March 26, 27, and 28, 2026.

The submission deadline extended to February 23, 2026.

The Notre Dame Queer Studies Symposium invites graduate students to share their research at a two-day interdisciplinary conference, taking place at the University of Notre Dame on March 27–28, 2026. We welcome participants from any discipline working on queer studies and are excited to bring together a diverse community of voices this year. Applicants may submit proposals for one of three formats: group panels, workshops, or individual papers for panel presentations. All proposals should be submitted using clicking the button above and using the submission form by February 23rd, 2026, at 11:59 PM Eastern.

Please note that panels and workshops are expected to be held in person. If you would benefit from a hybrid option for accessibility reasons, please indicate this in your abstract—we want to make sure all participants can fully engage in the symposium.

If you have any questions, please reach out to Hyunsoo Kim at hkim35@nd.edu or Miranda Macfarlane at mmacfarl@nd.edu.

We look forward to reading your proposals!

The Catholic Theological Society of America named Flora Tang, a peace studies and theology doctoral candidate at the University of Notre Dame, as the recipient of this year’s prestigious Catherine Mowry LaCugna Award. Named after the late Notre Dame theology professor Catherine Mowry LaCugna, the award celebrates the best academic essay from a new scholar in the field of theology within the Roman Catholic tradition. Tang is a 2020-2026 recipient of the John and Judy Scully Fellowship.

Read more on Flora Tang and the Mowry LaCugna Award.

Then on November 5, at 5:30 PM, talk with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, in 210 O'Shaughnessy Hall.

Staring: How We Look Discussion with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Join the Queer Studies Graduate Working Group for a discussion with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, (Professor Emerita of English and Bioethics at Emory University and pioneer of disability studies), on her influential monograph, Staring: How We Look.

All interested faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and advanced undergrads are warmly invited to join us as we explore queer modes of attention and visibility through Staring’s intersectional, interdisciplinary approach to disability, normativity, and the politics of looking. This two-part discussion will take place October 28th and November 5th. On the 28th our group will host a discussion of Staring in preparation for our conversation with Garland-Thomson a week later, on the 5th.

Questions? Contact Miranda Macfarlane (mmacfarl@nd.edu).

Register for both sessions at Staring Discussion RSVP.

Book Discussion
October 28, 5:30 PM
210 O'Shaughnessy Hall

Discussion with the author, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
November 5, 5:30 PM
210 O'Shaughnessy Hall

Schedule and Abstracts

Please Register.

9:00 AM - 9:30 AM Breakfast and Welcome Comments, Hesburgh Library 231 A,B,C

9:30 AM - 3:00 PM Panels featuring research by ND graduate students, Hesburgh Library 231 A,B,C

3:30 PM - 4:30 PM Keynote Lecture by Kris Trujillo, Bond Hall Auditorium
     *Kris Trujillo is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature, The Divinity School, and The College, University of Chicago 

4:30 PM - 6:00 PM Reception, Bond Hall Atrium

On January 14, 2025, it was announced that four Arts & Letters faculty won NEH fellowships. Congratulations to Marisel Moreno, a Gender Studies Affiliated Professor of Latinx Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, for her project examining Hurricane Maria's cultural impact on Puerto Rico.  

Amplifying Cultural Expression After a Disaster

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in Sept. 2017, leaving the U.S. territory reeling from its aftermath that can still be felt today.

The following spring, in partnership with the University of Michigan, Moreno, whose area of expertise is U.S. Latinx literature, and Spanish professor Tom Anderson, led and co-produced and online course and created the multimedia project “Listening to Puerto Rico,” in which they interviewed Puerto Ricans about the immediate impact of the Category 4 hurricane’s destruction.

“As a Puerto Rican born and raised in the archipelago but who has been living stateside for decades, I am one of the millions of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora who witnessed, from afar, the destruction of our homeland,” she said. “There were limited ways to help immediately following the hurricane, but in spring 2018 a unique opportunity arose to create awareness about Puerto Rico and the impact of the storm.”

Deriving inspiration from those interviews, Moreno is now focusing on her NEH-supported project, tentatively titled, Eye of the Storm: Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rican Cultural Production. The book will focus on Puerto Rican literary and cultural expressions post-Maria, and Moreno said those aspects play a “crucial role by providing a counter-narrative to the dehumanizing rhetoric of the local and federal governments.”

“By examining the representation of the hurricane’s impact in literature and other art forms, I aim to untangle the links between colonialism, anti-Blackness, disaster capitalism, climate change, and migration,” she said. “It has been more than seven years since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, yet much of the archipelago is still experiencing the consequences of the storm — or what I call the ‘afterlives of disaster.’”

Puerto Rican cultural production, Moreno contends in her project, resists the colonial violence that reproduces the afterlives of disaster by being life-affirming and a testament to the survival of the Puerto Rican people.

"This project," Moreno said, "can also shed light on how cultural creation can uplift resistance to colonial violence and help imagine a decolonial future, especially for communities in the Global South." She also believes this is especially topical as vulnerable communities of color face challenges in light of globalization and climate change.

“I am extremely grateful to everyone who has supported me,” she said. “Winning this fellowship has given me a renewed sense of confidence in this project, which is very close to my heart.”

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on January 22, 2025.

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Read more about Eli in The Observer.

They also go on class trips to Tony Award-winning shows in Chicago and to local karaoke nights.

This might sound unexpected for a typical English class. But combining literary study with experiential learning is all in a day's work for Marcus, an assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of English.

Her interdisciplinary research specializations include American and African American literature, popular music and sound studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Marcus is also the author of a new book, Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis, a similarly interdisciplinary project that has attracted major media attention and led to a multicity book tour.

In the classroom, Marcus often incorporates movement, theater, and music to bring the material alive and help students learn more effectively — and to have fun.

“I strongly believe that intellectual knowledge about a topic is always going to be deeper if there is an experiential dimension to that knowledge as well,” she said.

Making strides

The first time Marcus taught her course on American literature and popular music from 1860 to 1945, she realized that while some students (including Notre Dame marching band members) brought substantial musical experience to the class, others needed to build a technical vocabulary for talking about music.

So she devised exercises to help students speak and write about musical elements such as rhythm, meter, instrumentation, and compositional structure.

When learning about Sousa’s important role in small-town musical culture, for instance, students strode around the room to his military marches. They raised their hands above their heads when they heard the march’s first melodic theme and crossed their arms over their chests when they heard the second melody.

“We’re panting by the end of the song,” she said with a laugh. “It’s exhausting. But they really get it!”

Marcus said the activity helps students learn to listen analytically to a piece of music, identify its time signature, and notice when it changes from one section to another — essential skills for confidently discussing and writing about music.

In the course — which examined how racial politics, women’s changing roles, and mass commodity production influenced art between the mid-19th century and the end of World War II — students also used an 1835 shape-note songbook to harmonize “Amazing Grace.” The exercise enhanced discussions about the different ways people come to know things about sound, and it provided students with an understanding of how these hymnals made music accessible to amateur singers in early America.

In Marcus’ University Seminar course, Performance and Rebellion, first-year students each picked a dance move from West Side Story to memorize, then taught it to their classmates. Afterward, students identified how different movements conveyed specific feelings, such as exuberance, tension, and pride, based on how they themselves had felt when doing the dance.

“Instead of just watching the movement and talking about it, you're doing it yourself,” said Marcus, a faculty affiliate of the Gender Studies Program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience. “It's also a great trust-building exercise, because everybody is taking turns being vulnerable. In my teaching, I want to create a community where students support each other in sounding out the limits of their expertise and pushing beyond them.”

_{Patient attentiveness}

Marcus was introduced to this approach to teaching as a doctoral student in English at Princeton University, where she was awarded a competitive scholarship in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM).

“In IHUM, we each had to lead a participatory workshop on our research, and we were explicitly encouraged to experiment, to play around with format and method,” she said. “We were always asking: What is the widest range of practices we can bring to bear on our intellectual inquiries?”

The approach complements a patient attentiveness to aesthetic objects that is a signature of Notre Dame’s Department of English.

“In literary study, we commit to an honest account of what is actually in the poem, or novel, or story, or movie that we’re engaging with,” Marcus said. “We don’t leapfrog over the specifics and the material texture of our objects to talk about big ideas and political forces right away. We might get there eventually, but if and when we do, we’re ready to be responsible to our objects and understand how their complexity often defies easy instrumentalization.”

Marcus also thrives on observing the patterns, conversations, conflicts, and agreements during engaging class discussions.

“The most profound learning really happens when you work with others to collectively produce an understanding of a text or a concept rather than consuming it ready-made from someone else,” she said. “Classroom learning makes it possible to do things as a group that would be hard or even impossible to do alone.”

It’s a bonus that class discussions often inform her research.

“It’s a privilege to gather around a table with 14 to 16 extremely smart people and hear what they think about things. My students have great insights,” she said. “The questions they ask sharpen my own thinking.”

Disappointment and success

Marcus’ new book — Political Disappointment, published in May by Harvard University Press — details how writers and artists across the 20th century reckoned directly with political nonfulfillment in their songs, stories, documentaries, and more, and it argues that disappointment can serve as meaningful grounds for solidarity.

“Experiencing defeat is inexorably a part of laboring for a better community, nation, and world,” she said. “But recognizing this fact doesn’t have to be entirely depressing, because disappointment is proof of survival — it’s a mode of ongoing desire in search of new forms. My research shows it has also been incredibly generative, especially for people who confronted it head-on and came to understand its power to bring people together in new ways.”

The book has received significant national media attention, including reviews in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Bookforum.

“Marcus shows the ways in which Black activists and writers, in particular, have continued to express their political desires. In doing so, she draws our attention to the centrality of disappointment in American political life,” Princeton University professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in her piece in The New Yorker. “There is a fear of finality with failure, whereas Marcus is pulling her readers toward the continuity of desire for change.”

Thinking deeply and writing have been constants for Marcus, who wrote a book-length school project on world religions at the age of 11 and by high school was self-publishing articles about politics, literature, and music in the handmade magazines, or zines, that she made with friends.

More recently, she’s written reviews and essays for national media, including The New Republic and the Los Angeles Times.

Music is another long-standing passion for Marcus, who started playing piano at age 4 and was part of the feminist punk Riot Grrrl uprising in her teens.

She’s played drums and keyboards in several bands, appeared in a documentary about the lead singer of Bikini Kill, and composed music for a klezmer-rock-opera version of the Yiddish play The Dybbuk. And she’s wrapping up a four-year term as associate editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

If Marcus had time now, she’d start a band in South Bend.

“I know who in town I would have a band with; the fantasy lineup exists,” she said. “We just need to find a time to get together and jam.”

_{Grrrl to the front}

Political Disappointment is Marcus’s first academic book, but it’s not her first book. She wrote Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010) to ensure that this 1990s punk-feminist movement of young women and their “noisy message of female empowerment” would be accurately remembered. Her research included interviews with more than 100 active participants in the subculture.

“I’d visit them with my tape recorder and Xerox all their zines from the box under their bed,” she said. “It was a wonderful, wonderful process.”

Readers still regularly write to her about the book, which was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing and has been translated into Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish.

“It's so gratifying to me that the book is still in print, it's still taught, and teenagers are still reading it,” she said. “It’s done better than I ever expected.”

Creating zines has some surprising similarities with authoring academic books and peer-reviewed articles, Marcus said.

“Being in conversation with a community of people who are invested in the same questions and whom you see once a year at a convention, the relative slowness of production, and the idea that you can share the beginning stages of your thinking as part of the process of building something bigger from it — Riot Grrrl was built on all these things, and so is academia,” she said. “I’ve pretty much re-created my punk feminist milieu from the ’90s.”

Marcus is now working on a new project, tentatively titled “Scarlet Letters,” that examines the explosive development of popular music technologies and the spread of new ideas about gender roles from the 1890s to the 1930s.

As a graduate student, Marcus used to tell people that her dream job would allow her to combine English with music, gender studies, and creative writing.

“And that's what I've got,” she said with a smile. “Academia turned out to be the perfect place for the kind of thinker and writer that I am.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on April 12, 2024.

• the best graduate student essay written for a course or conference, and
• the best thesis chapter, dissertation chapter, journal article, or book chapter.

These awards are named in honor of G. Margaret Porter, a retired Gender Studies Librarian at the Hesburgh Library who enabled high-caliber research in gender by ensuring that students and faculty had access to the best resources in Gender Studies and include a cash award of $150. 

Submissions for these awards must be written by a Gender Studies graduate minor and must address issues of gender. The maximum length for submissions is 10,000 words (not including references). Research papers from courses and conferences are eligible if completion of the paper occurred no more than 12 months prior to the submission deadline. Journal articles and book chapters can be in draft form, under review, or published.

Through Gendered Lenses is published annually by Triota, the Gender Studies Honor Society at Notre Dame. The journal fosters research in the broad field of Gender Studies and highlights excellent work being done by undergraduate students across the tri-campus community.

We welcome submissions from all Notre Dame, St. Mary's, and Holy Cross undergraduate students, in all disciplines, of academic work focused on gender and/or sexualities.

Submissions are accepted until 11:59 PM on Monday, March 18, 2024.

For more information, or to submit your work, visit genderstudies.nd.edu/undergraduate/student-opportunities/triota/through-gendered-lenses/