Clara Montague
Lecturer
Email: Claramon@mit.edu
Subjects offered Fall 2025
Clara Montague is a Lecturer in the Women’s and Gender Studies program at MIT. Her research explores the politics of knowledge production across difference, focusing on how academic feminist networks can resist the backlash against diversifying higher education. Clara’s digital project, Women’s Studies Worldwide, reexamines this field’s transnational development using cartography, archiving, interviews, and literary analysis. Before coming to MIT, Clara was a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Grinnell College, where she assisted the Liberal Arts in Prison Program with its expansion to the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women. She enjoys collaborating with students from different backgrounds through core WGS classes, place-based learning experiences, and mentoring independent research. Clara’s other scholarly interests include abolitionist feminisms, art activism, digital humanities, and writing pedagogy. She previously worked as a copyeditor for the journal Feminist Studies and served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Turkey. Clara earned her PhD from the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2023.
-
HASS-A
same subject as CMS.418
Units: 3-0-9
M/W 1:30-3:00Explores gender and race through interdisciplinary perspectives from film and visual studies, art history, and performance studies. Provides an overview of methodologies and practices, with an emphasis on contemporary artists working across mediums. Contextualizes artistic output within broader systems of power and cultural institutions. Reflects on the politics of visibility, hypervisibility, and invisibility through an intersectional feminist approach that draws on perspectives from trans*, queer, feminist, dis/ability, and critical race theory. Lectures are supplemented by screenings, discussions, workshops, guest lectures, and optional field trips. Culminates in a final creative project that includes a presentation.
-
HASS-H
Units: 3-0-9
Tuesdays 7-10pmExplore emerging tools and techniques for knowledge production, artistic expression, and building community through the lens of Women’s and Gender Studies. Consider how marginalized populations have created, resisted, and utilized technologies to challenge systems of oppression and construct more just worlds both on and offline. Engaging interdisciplinary approaches to the study of human sexuality, this course introduces students to foundational debates at the intersection of feminism, queer theory, and digital humanities. Through hands-on activities, collaborative annotation, and independent research, we will experiment with innovative approaches to techniques such as virtual reality, gaming, cartography, archives, web design, robotics, social media, mind-mapping, etc. Reconceptualize gender, sexuality, and other categories of difference in light of new technologies reshaping our individual and collective lives.
-
HASS-H; CI-H
Units: 3-0-9
M/W 3:30-5pmDrawing on multiple disciplines - such as literature, history, economics, psychology, philosophy, political science, anthropology, media studies and the arts - to examine cultural assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality. Integrates analysis of current events through student presentations, aiming to increase awareness of contemporary and historical experiences of women, and of the ways sex and gender interact with race, class, nationality, and other social identities. Students are introduced to recent scholarship on gender and its implications for traditional disciplines.
Subjects taught in recent years
-
Units: 3-0-9
Th 2:00-5:00pmThis special subject course examines the history of Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT with a focus on documenting its origins as well as its impact. Amid escalating backlash against efforts to diversify higher education, we utilize lessons from the past to chart a sustainable path forward for academic feminism both on our own campus and worldwide. The class explores key debates in WGS around intersectionality, interdisciplinarity, and institutionalization that have informed the process of curricular change. Students will also develop their own research projects informed by feminist methods, with opportunities to practice conducting interviews, managing archival data, and designing digital exhibits.
-
HASS-A
same subject as CMS.418
Units: 3-0-9
M/W 1:30-3:00Explores gender and race through interdisciplinary perspectives from film and visual studies, art history, and performance studies. Provides an overview of methodologies and practices, with an emphasis on contemporary artists working across mediums. Contextualizes artistic output within broader systems of power and cultural institutions. Reflects on the politics of visibility, hypervisibility, and invisibility through an intersectional feminist approach that draws on perspectives from trans*, queer, feminist, dis/ability, and critical race theory. Lectures are supplemented by screenings, discussions, workshops, guest lectures, and optional field trips. Culminates in a final creative project that includes a presentation.
-
HASS-H; CI-H
Units: 3-0-9
M/W 3:30-5pmDrawing on multiple disciplines - such as literature, history, economics, psychology, philosophy, political science, anthropology, media studies and the arts - to examine cultural assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality. Integrates analysis of current events through student presentations, aiming to increase awareness of contemporary and historical experiences of women, and of the ways sex and gender interact with race, class, nationality, and other social identities. Students are introduced to recent scholarship on gender and its implications for traditional disciplines.
Subjects offered Spring 2026
-
HASS-H; CI-M
same subject as 17.007 / 24.137
Units: 3-0-9
T/R 3:30-5pm
Analyzes theories of gender and politics, especially ideologies of gender and their construction; definitions of public and private spheres; gender issues in citizenship, the development of the welfare state, experiences of war and revolution, class formation, and the politics of sexuality. Graduate students are expected to pursue the subject in greater depth through reading and individual research. -
HASS-S
Units: 3-0-9
T 7-10pm
Explores how city design and planning impact communities, through the lens of data activism. Students develop, implement, and evaluate digital tools that support community-based organizations, addressing diverse domains such as housing, violence prevention, and environmental health. Through interactions with relevant organizations, students interpret data and explore how issues of gender, race, sexuality, disability, and other identities impact how policies, technology, and activism are employed. Specific topics vary but may include data activism in social change, production of activist data, potential pitfalls of AI, and machine learning. Prior experience with coding, visualization, mapping/GIS, or data analysis helpful but not required. May be repeated once for credit if specific topics studied differ.