This ongoing oral history project aims to identify and capture the voices of those feminist academics who introduced women’s, gender and feminist studies to the University of Edinburgh; to trace their stories and career histories; and to map the development of WGFS teaching and feminist classrooms in the institution over time.

So far, we have interviewed a handful of academics mostly from the School of Social and Political Science (which kindly provided seed-corn funding). Audio-clips and corresponding transcript excerpts from these interviews are already available here as part of the online archive being compiled under the aegis of this project. Full recordings and transcripts will be available in due course. Course outlines shared by these academics will also be included in the online archive. We hope that this archive will be of interest to not only those keen to know more about the institutional history of WGFS and sexuality studies at Edinburgh but also those researching WGFS in Scotland and beyond. 

Drawing on this initial set of interviews, a series of blog posts have been developed as a collaborative endeavour of genderED and the UGC-UKIERI funded, Teaching Feminisms, Transforming Lives project. You can read them on the genderED blog.

For a brief history of WGFS at Edinburgh, see this partial timeline. This and the archive are very much works in progress. If you have memories to share of early women’s, gender and feminist studies teaching and research at University of Edinburgh, please contact genderED: gender.ed@ed.ac.uk 

(Led by Dr Radhika Govinda)