The board of visitors at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg has approved the establishment of a master of arts degree program in women’s and gender studies. The first students are expected to enroll in the new master’s degree program in women and gender studies in the fall of 2015.
The Women and Gender Studies program at Virginia Tech is led by Katrina M. Powell, an associate professor of rhetoric and writing in the department of English at the university. Dr. Powell joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 2006 after teaching at Louisiana State University and the University of Maryland. She is the author of The Anguish of Displacement: The Politics of Literacy in the Letters of Mountain Families in Shenandoah National Park (University of Virginia Press, 2007).
Dr. Powell is a graduate of Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She earned a master’s degree in professional writing and editing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition at the University of Louisville.