Grants or Gifts Relating to Women in Higher Education

Here is this week’s news of grants and gifts that may be of particular interest to women in higher education.

Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, received a five-year, $500,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation that will enable the university to hire two women faculty members, one in computer science and one in electrical and computer engineering. The grant is part of the Clare Boothe Luce Program, which seeks to increase the number of women in STEM fields.

The University of Iowa received a grant from the U.S. Veterans Administration for its MomMoodBooster program. The program is an online intervention tool that seeks to help women veterans who suffer from postpartum depression. An initial pilot program involving 40 women has produced positive results.

Sweet Briar College, the liberal arts educational institution for women in Virginia, received a three-year grant from the Council on Independent Colleges that will fund an educational program that will allow women at Sweet Briar to take courses online offered by Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota and Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio. Sweet Briar College will offer two courses that students at other members of the Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction may take online.

Fordham University received a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to fund research on the practice of “child-gifting” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. Child gifting refers to the practice of purchasing or kidnapping dark-skinned children in Africa and elsewhere. These children were given to upper-class French women as travel souvenirs and fashion accessories. The grant project is under the direction of Lise Schreier, an associate professor of French at Fordham University. She is writing a book on the subject with the title The Playthings of Empire: Child-Gifting and the Politics of French Femininity.