Centers

Students looking to study sexuality in many university settings often find that only one or two courses covering just a minimal area of the topic (usually with a heavy emphasis on biomedical issues) are available during their years of study. On the other hand, faculty members who teach sexuality studies often do so in isolation, and without either the time or expertise to adequately cover all major areas of the topic.

The Department of Sociomedical Sciences has long been a pioneer in research on the social dimensions of gender and sexuality. As early as the 1980s, with the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, social scientists at Columbia had already begun to make important contributions to the field. Studies involving sex and gender were developed (e.g., the late John Martin's pioneering cohort study of the effect of HIV/AIDS on gay men in New York City; Richard Parker's groundbreaking ethnographic study of the construction of sexualities in Brazil; Ronald Bayer's work on AIDS in the industrialized democracies) along with a range of relevant courses. These activities played an extremely important role in catalyzing research around questions of gender and sexuality during the early and mid-1980s and the 1990s.

The Predoctoral Fellowship in Gender, Sexuality and Health is a culmination of recent efforts to expand the Department's research and training activities in gender and sexuality. The Department's distinguished faculty in this area is led by Richard Parker, Director of the Center for Gender, Sexuality and Health, and an internationally-recognized scholar in the field. The predoctoral training program complements an existing postdoctoral program in Gender, Sexuality, Health and Human Rights, directed by Carole Vance, and the recently initiated MPH track in Sexuality and Health.