Two awarded Women’s Philanthropy Council Fellowships

Two doctoral candidates in the humanities at UW–Madison are recipients of Women’s Philanthropy Council Fellowships for the 2004-05 academic year.

Heather L. DuBois Bourenane, from the Department of African Languages and Literature, and Thyra Emily Knapp, Department of German, will receive the fellowships, the first ever awarded by the council, as part of a special 2002-03 Collaborative Giving Project. For this project, council members’ contributions were pooled to fund fellowships for graduate students. The fellowships, granted through the UW Graduate School, were designed to bolster the arts, humanities and social sciences.

DuBois Bourenane and Knapp were chosen because their work and leadership history advance many of the council’s goals, such as developing women’s leadership, engaging women in the life of UW–Madison and furthering women’s understanding of philanthropy and finances. They have been actively engaged at UW–Madison, and they have succeeded in various leadership roles. They also are active philanthropists, volunteering their time for projects beyond their course work and research toward their theses.

“The Women’s Philanthropy Council is pleased to be able to support these outstanding young women leaders,” Joen Greenwood, council president, says. “Through its Collaborative Giving Project, the council has been able to expand the impact of its members’ individual philanthropy by making a positive difference for women on the UW campus. The members of the council have provided an example, and we invite other alumnae to set up collaborative giving groups to support the UW.”

DuBois Bourenane holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Michigan State University and a master’s degree in African and African Studies from The Ohio State University. She has been an active organizer of conferences and colloquium series, including the “Toward an Africa Without Borders Conference” last fall.

She is an editor of Voices, a department publication that explores issues of written and oral artistic production in Africa and the Diaspora. She is an instructor in African literature and was assistant producer of the radio program “Black Studies Broadcast Journal” at Ohio State. She also is a leader on the organizing committee for the Department of African Literature’s 40th anniversary celebration. Her dissertation will deal with the politics of form in African and Diaspora fiction.

Knapp received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Germanic Languages from the University of Kansas. She also was an exchange scholar at Christian-Albrechts-Universitat zu Kiel and Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms Univeritat Bonn in Germany.

Knapp has an outstanding record of leadership in UW–Madison’s Ph.D. program, including academics, service and teaching. She has organized graduate student conferences and lecture series, and while at Kansas she was president of the Graduate Association of German Students. Her work focuses on the writings of three contemporary German authors, two of whom are women. Last spring, she was stage manager for a UW–Madison Department of German production of Soren Vioma’s “Das Kontingent,” and in 2001 she played the lead character in the department’s production of “Herr Peter Squenz” by Andreas Gryphius.

Founded in 1988 as The Council on Women’s Giving, the Women’s Philanthropy Council is a program of the University of Wisconsin Foundation. The Council pioneered new national standards for women as philanthropists, and it is the first major-gift organization for women at a co-ed educational institution.