The First Ph.D. in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Carly Thompson recently became the first recipient of a Ph.D. in feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The feminist studies program has about 80 undergraduate students, but Dr. Thompson is the first recipient of a degree from the doctoral program that was established five years ago.

Dr. Thompson’s dissertation, “Unbecoming: Visibility Politics and Queer Rurality,” summarized her research on the tension between people who identify as LGBTQ in the midwestern United States and the mainstream gay rights movement. Her doctoral thesis won the Winifred and Louis Lancaster Dissertation Award for social sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dr. Thompson holds a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric and woman’s studies from St. Cloud State University in Minnesota and a master’s degree in women’s studies from the University of Arizona. She has accepted a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Rice University in Houston, Texas.