The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies
The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies (FQT Center) is Penn’s premier institutional site supporting collaborative academic research, artistic production, and public engagement for scholars, artists, students, and activists who are invested in gender and sexuality studies. This includes scholars of feminist, queer, transgender, disability, and environmental studies that center a history of U.S. enslavement, genocide, settler colonialism, and exclusionary immigration policy—all of which continue to shape gender and sexuality in the present—as well as those who stress the colonial, imperial, transnational, and global frameworks within which gender and sexual categories and identifications take shape.
Since its founding in 1984, the FQT Center (originally named the Alice Paul Center) has hosted cutting-edge speakers, postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and artists-in-residence and sponsored field-defining workshops, conferences, symposia, and year-long research programs. Our core and affiliated faculty represent more than 20 departments, programs and schools at Penn, and are national and international leaders in the study of gender, sexuality, and women. In partnership with the Program on Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, our primary mission is to facilitate disciplinary and interdisciplinary feminist scholarship and promote the connections between research and public engagement.
As we move into our fifth decade, the FQT Center will continue to support academic and artistic work and to build connections between research initiatives and social justice movements, the Penn community and the city and world beyond.
The history of the FQT Center has been shaped by a commitment to critical self-reflection and to making the structural changes necessary to become a space of inclusion, collectivity, and respectful debate.
The Archives
