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Presentation of 2017 Margherita von Brentano Award

Award went equally to legal scholar Beate Rudolf and research project on refugee women

№ 184/2017 from Jul 04, 2017

This year's Margherita von Brentano Award of Freie Universität Berlin was presented on Tuesday evening. It went equally to a professor of law, Beate Rudolf, and a research project on refugee women ("Frauen und Flucht"). The award presentation speeches were held by legal studies scholar Marsha Freeman from the University of Minnesota and María do Mar Castro Varela, a professor of social work and general pedagogy at the Alice Salomon University in Berlin. The Margherita von Brentano Award includes 15,000 euros.

According to the selection panel, Beate Rudolf, the director of the German Institute for Human Rights, was recognized for her long-term academic and social policy work in the field of human rights, and in particular, women's rights. The "Frauen und Flucht" project, which is led by Professor Hansjörg Dilger and Kristina Dohrn from the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, was recognized for its outstanding achievements in focusing on the sociopolitical relevance of the special needs of refugee women, while at the same time being a successful example of research-oriented teaching.

The Margherita von Brentano Award is presented every two years by the Executive Board of Freie Universität to outstanding individuals and innovative projects that have rendered outstanding services to support women and/or gender research. It has been awarded since 1995. The previous award winners include the Berlin lawyer Seyran Ateş, an initiative group calling for the founding of a Center for Gender Research in Medicine (GiM), and the MISEAL collaborative project that focuses on gender equality, especially equal participation of different social groups, in higher education in Latin American countries.

The name patron of the award, Margherita von Brentano, earned her doctorate in 1948 under Martin Heidegger, and in 1971 she was appointed a professor at the Institute of Philosophy at Freie Universität. In 1970 she became the first woman to be elected vice president of the university. As a critical intellectual at the beginning of the 1960s, she became concerned with overcoming professional discrimination against women, especially their almost complete exclusion from the higher hierarchical levels at universities and research institutions. She was also active in other areas of society as well: until her death in 1995, she promoted the erection of a Berlin memorial to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.

Further Information

Heike Pantelmann, Margherita von Brentano Center, Freie Universität Berlin, Tel.: +49 30 838-53044, Email: mvbz@fu-berlin.de