University of Wisconsin Gender & Women's Studies Librarian

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University of Wisconsin Gender & Women's Studies Librarian

The Wisconsin Gender & Women's Studies Librarian - Your premier resource for intersectional information on gender, women, & feminism since 1977

The UW System Office of the Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian (GWSL) is one of the premier resources for support of gender, women’s studies, and LGBTQ+ scholarship and librarianship. The GWSL provides bibliographic and curriculum support, inter-institutional cooperation, information sharing, and advocacy related to the fields of women’s, gender, and LGBTQ+ studies and to gender-focused scholarship in the traditional disciplines. We value and affirm the role that libraries and other information services play in the empowerment of people in our community and beyond. Through local, national, and international partnerships, we aim to provide relevant resources, skills, and support to those researching and working to improve the lives of women and girls throughout the world. We produce an online collection of tables of contents for journals and magazines called FEMINIST PERIODICALS: A CURRENT LISTING OF CONTENTS and two open-access databases for research: DOROTHY (scholarly books) and SYLVIA (films). We also offer reference assistance, professional presentations, and research consultation. Our extensive in-house collection of biographical dictionaries, encyclopedias, handbooks, guides, and other reference books on women and gender is available for perusing and research by students, faculty, and the public.

09/28/2026

Book of the Week: Desperate Bodies by Lydia Mathis 🤗

With a voice that vibrates on the page, Lydia Mathis's debut collection is set in the American South, and her sharply drawn, authentic characters shine a light on what we're willing to do to ourselves and to others in service of our desires. The madness in the ordinary rules here: an overworked college safety officer is confronted by a bloody figure who walks into her office; a s*x worker runs into a client en route to a parent-teacher conference; a teacher is plagued by a ghost determined to tidy her apartment.

"Mathis's stories have an easy resonance, a tangible signature one can recognize, delight in, and mourn with as they move through the body, creating a stunning gravity that lingers long after the last word."--Dantiel W. Moniz, author of Milk Blood Heat

09/25/2026

Celebrating the legacy of bell hooks on her birthday. Her groundbreaking work transformed how we understand feminism, love, justice, and community, reminding us that “feminism is for everybody.”

09/24/2026

Introducing the five threads for the upcoming 2027 WGSC Spring Conference! Our call for proposals is open through November 15th, 2026.

For more information and to submit a proposal, visit the WGSC Conference website: https://go.wisc.edu/r6gp57

09/22/2026

Book of the Week! 🙌🙌🙌

In this deeply personal book, Elizabeth Alexander gives us profound and galvanizing lessons from culture and life to move through challenging times. In close readings of visionary and beloved poets and writers--Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and June Jordan, among others--Dr. Alexander meditates on how words and values can sustain and inspire us, interweaving her voice with revelatory works of art by some of our most extraordinary visual artists, richly reproduced in the book's pages.

"A timely meditation on poetry and connectedness, modeling ways of resisting racism and authoritarianism." --Kirkus Reviews

09/17/2026

The latest issue of Feminist Periodicals is live! Check it out at feministperiodicals.org/collections/show/34🥳

Feminist Periodicals is a free resource to help researchers, scholars, and students, as well as the general public, see what is currently being written & published in journals & magazines in gender and women's studies, s*xuality studies, and LGBTQIA+ studies. We gather tables of contents from periodicals in these fields and index them so you can find resources relevant to your areas of interest.

This latest issue includes contents information from Journal of International Women's Studies, African Journal of Reproductive Health, Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, Bi Women Quarterly, and more!

09/14/2026

Book of the Week 💗💗

In her final memoir, Gloria Steinem offered a candid, inspiring portrait of her early life and journey as an activist, while looking ahead to the next chapters of the fight for equality—a rare opportunity to learn directly from one of feminism’s most enduring voices.

Gloria Steinem was a feminist activist and co-founder of Ms. Magazine during Second-Wave Feminism in the 1960s and 70s. She taught women to express themselves and to fight for their rights. She passed away on September 2, 2026. She was 92.

09/08/2026

Book of the Week! 🙌🙌

Since the arrival of Columbus, thousands of perpetrators have gotten away with murder, burying evidence of their crimes in police reports and court testimony. How Settlers Get Away with Murder unearths that hidden evidence to expose the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people.

“Liza brings forth alarming accounts of our ancestors’ untold stories. The read created such an emotional impact in confirming our ancestors’ strength and powerful resolve.”
—Cherokee Nation relation of Lydia Kingfisher

09/03/2026

“The truth will set you free, but first it will p**s you off.”

Today, we mourn Gloria Steinem - writer, organizer, and feminist icon whose work helped transform the possibilities of American life.

Born in 1934 to a Jewish father and a Presbyterian mother, Steinem grew up with a complicated relationship to Jewish identity, later speaking more openly about her Jewish heritage and the antisemitism that shaped her family’s history.

As a journalist during the 1960s, Steinem’s coverage of a public hearing on abortion was the turning point which propelled her towards the women’s movement. In 1969 she became a true spokesperson for the feminist movement, mobilizing a generation to advance the cause of women’s liberation. In 1971 she co-founded Ms. Magazine, the first feminist periodical with a national readership. She helped bring feminist ideas into the mainstream while building coalitions across movements for racial, economic, reproductive, and LGBTQ+ justice.

Her influence on Jewish feminism was both direct and generational: Steinem helped create a space for questioning inherited gender roles, challenging patriarchal institutions, and imagining women as authors of their own lives.

May her memory be for a revolution.

09/02/2026

Fall Semester is back in session! Our office will be open Monday through Thursday per usual. Stop by on the 4th floor of Memorial Library to browse our collection or pick up some fun buttons! For more information, please visit library.wisc.edu/gwslibrarian.

08/31/2026

Last August book of the week goes to ... ⭐Changing Gender by Susan Stryker ⭐

In this genre bending book, historian and theorist Stryker explores the roots of gender and its modern influences. Through both personal stories and historical research, Stryker exposes limiting assumptions and examines how changing gender could change reality as we know it.

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Website

https://www.library.wisc.edu/gwslibrarian/

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