Four Women Scholars Win 2017 Grawemeyer Awards

The Grawemeyer Awards, presented by the University of Louisville, are five annual prizes given in the fields of music, improving world order, psychology, education, and religion. They were established in 1984 by H. Charles Grawemeyer, the founder and CEO of Reliance Paint and Varnish Company, with an initial endowment of $9 million. Grawemeyer died in 1993.

The first award, Music Composition, was presented in 1985. The award for Ideas Improving World Order was added in 1988 and Education in 1989. In 1990, a fourth award, Religion, was added as a joint prize with the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Psychology was added in 2000, with the first award given out in 2001.

This year, four women, with current affiliations at U.S. academic institutions, have been honored with Grawemeyer Awards. Each of the awards include a $100,000 prize which will be presented in April in Louisville.

Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy

Diana E. Hess and Paula McAvoy are sharing the Grawemeyer Award in Education. Dr. Hess holds the Karen A. Falk Distinguished Chair of Education and is the dean of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. McAvoy is the director of the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The colleagues were honored for their book The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education (Routledge, 2014).

After serving as a high school social studies teacher. Professor Hess joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin in 1999 as an assistant professor. She became dean of the School of Education in 2015. Dr. Hess is a graduate of Western Illinois University in Macomb. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Illinois and a doctoral degree from the University of Washington.

Before joining the staff at the Center for Ethics and Education in 2015, Dr. McAvoy was an assistant professor at Illinois State University. She is currently working on a new book about the history and aims of sex education in the United States. Dr. McAvoy is a graduate of the University of California, Davis, where she majored in international relations. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in educational policy studies from the University of Wisconsin.

Marsha Linehan

Marsha Linehan, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington won the Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. Professor Linehan was honored for her introduction of dialectical behavior therapy to help patients with suicidal thoughts, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders, addition, post-traumatic distress disorder, and depression. Dr. Linehan stated: “At a young age, I vowed to get myself out of hell and then go back and get others out.”

Professor Linehan has been on the faculty at the University of Washington since 1977. She is the author or co-author of seven books including the DBT Skills Training Manual (Guilford Press, 2nd edition, 2014). Professor Linehan is the founder of the nonprofit Linehan Institute, Behavioral Tech, a training and consulting company, and Behavioral Tech Research. A native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Dr. Linehan holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Loyola University in Chicago.

Dana Burde

Dana Burde, an associate professor in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Dr. Burde was honored for her book Schools for Conflict or for Peace in Afghanistan (Columbia University Press, 2014). Her book was based on eight years of field research in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Before joining the faculty at NYU, Dr. Burde was an associate research scholar/postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. She is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, where she majored in English literature. She holds a master’s degree in international education from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in comparative education and political science from Columbia University.