How to Find PhD Supervisors in Gender and Women's Studies (and Get Funded)

Gender and women's studies breaks one assumption almost every other field hub on this site relies on: that there's a department to search. Here, there often isn't a single one. Some schools run a standalone PhD program with its own admissions process and its own funding line. Many more run the field as a joint degree or a certificate layered onto a PhD in an entirely different department, English, History, Sociology, Anthropology, or Political Science. Knowing which model a specific school uses changes who you're actually looking for, and where you'll find them.

The standalone PhD model: real, but a minority of programs

A genuine, specific list of US universities offer a standalone doctoral degree in this field, under varying names. UCLA offers a fully funded PhD in Gender Studies. Emory runs a PhD in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, with admitted students receiving an annual stipend paid over twelve months, subsidized health insurance, and five years of fellowship support. Indiana University's Department of Gender Studies funds all admitted PhD students, including international students, during the autumn and spring semesters. Rutgers funds its Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies PhD for five years through a combination of fellowships, teaching assistantships, and graduate research assistantships. The University of Arizona's Gender and Women's Studies PhD funds most students primarily through teaching and research assistant positions during their coursework years. Stony Brook, the University of Minnesota (as Feminist Studies), the University of Kentucky (Gender and Women's Studies), and Ohio State (Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies) also run standalone doctoral programs, though the funding terms for several of these weren't confirmable in the research for this guide, and Ohio State's own program description specifically flags admission as highly competitive. Confirm current funding guarantees directly with each program rather than relying on any aggregator's summary, including this one.

Michigan's distinct model: a genuine joint PhD, not a certificate

The University of Michigan runs a structurally different arrangement worth calling out on its own. Its Women's and Gender Studies program offers a joint PhD paired with English, History, or Psychology, a real dual degree rather than a certificate bolted onto a home-discipline PhD. Admission runs jointly through both programs, and joint PhD students are funded for five or six years through a combination of fellowships and teaching or research assistantships, the same funding mechanism students in the paired home discipline would use. If you're specifically drawn to this field as a genuine co-equal discipline rather than an add-on, Michigan's model is the clearest example of that structure we found, though it's worth checking whether other schools run an equivalent joint arrangement under a different name before assuming Michigan is the only one.

The more common path: a home-discipline PhD plus a certificate or concentration

For most applicants, the realistic path into this field runs through a PhD in a conventional discipline, combined with a formal certificate, concentration, or joint master's in gender or women's studies layered on top. The specific mechanics vary by school. The University at Albany runs a combined MA in Women's Studies and PhD in Sociology, where sociology PhD students can count core women's studies courses toward their PhD and admission is reviewed by both departments jointly. Rutgers offers PhD concentrations in English, History, Sociology, and Political Science that pair with its women's and gender studies graduate certificate. The University of Illinois at Chicago runs an interdepartmental gender and women's studies concentration open to students in departments including English and Sociology, which requires sign-off from a faculty member in the student's actual home department, not just interest from the student. Brandeis lets PhD students in several fields, including English and History, earn a women's, gender and sexuality studies MA alongside their primary PhD, which in some cases substitutes for the master's their home program would otherwise require.

The practical consequence: at a school running this affiliated model, the person you need to find isn't necessarily listed on the gender studies program's own "affiliated faculty" page as someone who admits PhD students directly. Admission runs through the home department, Sociology, History, English, or whichever discipline the degree is actually granted in, so confirm that a professor holds a genuine appointment there, and that the home department is actually accepting students in your subfield this cycle, before you treat an affiliated-faculty listing as equivalent to an admitting supervisor. Our guide to finding PhD supervisors in sociology and our guide to finding PhD supervisors in education both cover how a home-discipline search actually works in practice, which is the search you'll be running if you're pursuing gender studies through an affiliated or certificate route rather than a standalone program.

Named funding specific to this field is real, but mostly supplemental

The National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) is the field's main professional association, and it does fund student work directly, but at a scale that supplements a funding package rather than replacing one. Its Graduate Scholarship Award is described across several university fellowship offices as a $1,000 award for a student in the research or writing stage of a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation, open to current NWSA members. NWSA also runs narrower caucus-specific awards, including a $500 Lesbian Caucus Award for research specifically in lesbian, queer, or LGBT studies, and separate smaller awards through its Women of Color and Trans/Gender-Variant Caucuses. Deadlines for these awards appear inconsistently across secondary sources, some listings show a May deadline, others show older dates from past cycles, so check NWSA's own student awards page directly for the current cycle rather than trusting a cached figure.

The more substantial external funding most gender studies PhD candidates actually compete for runs through general humanities dissertation fellowships, not a gender-studies-specific program. The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship has funded gender studies scholars in past cohorts alongside philosophy, literature, history, music, and sociology candidates, providing a $30,000 stipend plus up to $8,000 in research funds and university fees for advanced students in their final year of writing. ACLS's Dissertation Innovation Fellowship similarly selected a 2025 fellow working in performance and feminist studies, out of a pool of nearly 900 applicants for 45 slots, with each award covering up to $52,000 across a stipend, research and travel funds, and an external mentorship stipend. Both are genuinely competitive, open to many fields at once, and aimed at the dissertation-writing stage specifically, not at funding admission or early coursework years, which is where your home department or standalone program's own multi-year package, not an external named award, is what actually has to carry you.

The NSF question we couldn't settle, and shouldn't guess at

A natural question, given how often NSF's Graduate Research Fellowship Program comes up across other fields covered on this site, is whether it reaches gender studies at all. We could not confirm a clear answer. NSF's publicly listed broad fields for GRFP include categories like Social Sciences and Psychology, but whether a specific gender-studies research project would actually qualify, and under which exact subfield, depends on a detailed appendix inside the current GRFP solicitation that we could not fully access in the research for this guide. Rather than guess, the honest answer is: don't assume GRFP eligibility either way. If it matters to your funding plan, read the current solicitation's own subfield appendix, or ask your prospective department directly, since getting this wrong by assuming eligibility that doesn't exist could leave a real gap in your funding plan.

A genuinely different model: LSE's Department of Gender Studies

If the US picture above, fragmented across standalone programs, joint degrees, and certificates with inconsistent funding, doesn't fit your situation, it's worth knowing that the UK runs a structurally different and more centralized model at at least one major institution. The London School of Economics runs its MPhil/PhD Gender programme directly through its own Department of Gender Studies, not as an affiliated add-on to another department. Funding runs through LSE's own PhD Studentships and through Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding, including a 1+3 route that starts with the MSc Gender Research as the "1" (first) year before the "3" (three-year) MPhil/PhD itself, which requires a dual application to both the MSc and the MPhil/PhD at once. London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) studentships are also available, but only once you already hold a place on the department's PhD programme, not as a route to secure one. One third-party listing described LSE PhD Studentships as covering full fees plus an annual stipend for four years, though that figure should be confirmed against LSE's own current funding page rather than relied on secondhand. The structural point that matters most: at LSE, gender studies is the department you apply to, funding and all, not a label layered onto a different one.

What this means for your actual search

Start by establishing which model a given school runs before you search for a specific person. If it's a standalone program, search its own faculty page directly the way you would for any other field hub on this site. If it's an affiliated or joint model, you're really running a home-discipline search, Sociology, History, English, Anthropology, or Political Science, filtered for professors who also hold a genuine appointment or formal affiliation with the gender or women's studies program, and whose recent publication record actually engages with gender, feminist theory, or sexuality studies rather than listing an old, inactive affiliation from years earlier. Checking that a professor is still actively publishing in the area you're interested in matters more here than in most fields, since an "affiliated faculty" list is often maintained loosely and can include people who haven't taught or supervised in the program for years.

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