U of I takes a lead role in building transgender studies

The Big Ten Academic Alliance has pledged $30,000 in grants to a proposal from the University of Illinois and the University of Minnesota to build transgender studies across the Big Ten campuses. Now, faculty members in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies are leading efforts to make the endeavor a reality.

Transgender studies is a relatively new field, emerging in the early 1990s. Toby Beauchamp, chair of the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, said there were not many transgender studies scholars when he started graduate school in the early 2000s. Even now, he said, there are comparatively few senior scholars in the field.

“As a tenured trans studies scholar now, I am thrilled that this grant enables me to facilitate the kind of robust intellectual and pedagogical community that I often wished for earlier in my career,” said Beauchamp.

The opportunity arose when the Big Ten Academic Alliance solicited grant proposals to foster academic and administrative collaboration among Big Ten universities. Beauchamp and Mimi Thi Nguyen, a professor in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, partnered with Aren Aizura from the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota to apply.  

The funding will go toward implementing a variety of events designed to help expand transgender studies programs and scholarship. Beauchamp expects that nearly all the Big Ten universities will participate.

“I think there remains a common assumption that trans research and communities thrive primarily in large cities on the coasts,” said Beauchamp. “I look forward to featuring the innovative work being done by scholars and teachers across the Midwest.”

As an emerging field, transgender studies explores many current issues such as "bathroom bills,” classroom materials, sex testing of athletes, and more. “These and other urgent topics deserve informed, nuanced discussion so that we can understand how such conflicts came to be and so that we can develop meaningful responses to them,” said Beauchamp.

The first event, a book manuscript workshop, will take place in spring 2025 at the University of Minnesota. It will also likely include a panel discussion about publishing and the future of transgender studies. Beauchamp said the event will allow early-career scholars in transgender studies to receive focused feedback on their books-in-progress from senior scholars in the field.

The University of Illinois will host the second event during the 2025-26 academic year. It will be a research symposium featuring faculty and student research. The event will be open to the public and will celebrate the fifth anniversary of Illinois's Chancellor's postdoctoral fellowship in transgender studies. The U of I is the only university to offer an ongoing postdoctoral fellowship of this kind, Beauchamp said.

“The success of this postdoctoral fellowship reflects broader support for trans studies at Illinois,” said Beauchamp.

The third event will be a pedagogy and curriculum forum at Penn State University. Beauchamp and other organizers plan to have workshops and presentations that focus on building programs and curricular frameworks that can be implemented across institutions.

“The working group and annual events we have planned will develop cross-campus collaboration and mentoring relationships,” said Beauchamp. “We hope they also help us draw on our collective knowledge and experiences to expand support for trans studies at individual institutions. I hope that the networks we build will continue to grow long after the grant period ends.”