DONOR NEWS

You can spark discoveries for
a changing world

EXCELERATE faculty and student excellence

The inaugural recipient of the Nadia Rubaii Prize is Maria Ressa, a journalist who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her reporting on an authoritarian regime in the Philippines. In April, Ressa was keynote speaker at I-GMAP’s 2023 Frontiers of Prevention meeting, an international gathering at of atrocity prevention scholars, practitioners and policymakers.
The inaugural recipient of the Nadia Rubaii Prize is Maria Ressa, a journalist who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her reporting on an authoritarian regime in the Philippines. In April, Ressa was keynote speaker at I-GMAP’s 2023 Frontiers of Prevention meeting, an international gathering at of atrocity prevention scholars, practitioners and policymakers. Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen.
The Charles E. Scheidt Family Foundation has given ’s unique and groundbreaking Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (I-GMAP) a generous gift to grow the institute and its impact on undergraduate and graduate education.

This gift provides for significant investments in faculty, post-doctoral fellows, research, programming and more, bringing national and global attention to our campus as a leading actor in the international community of atrocity prevention scholars and practitioners. It’ll also support the new Nadia Rubaii Prize and Lecture, as well as memorial fellowships, in her honor. Rubaii was co-director of I-GMAP and a professor before she died in March 2022.

“The Scheidt Family Foundation’s first gift established I-GMAP. Its second, larger gift allowed us to grow during some very difficult times, including the COVID pandemic and the death of our co-founder,” said Max Pensky, philosophy professor and I-GMAP co-director. “This newest and largest gift from the Foundation is transformational. With this generous support, we will dramatically scale up our existing programs and launch a range of new initiatives. Thanks to this gift, the next few years at I-GMAP will be a very exciting time.”

Investing in post-docs

Thanks to the donor’s generosity, I-GMAP can expand support for Charles E. Scheidt Post-Doctoral Fellows in Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, including by increasing the number of positions from two to five, starting in 2024. The competitive fellowship, which provides a research stipend and other resources, attracts top applicants from around the world.

Fabian Krautwald, one of the two fellows selected for the 2023-24 academic year, studies African societies’ changing interpretations of the colonial past, focusing on the former German colonies in Namibia and Tanzania. He’ll work on his book manuscript, which examines the long-term legacies of colonialism and genocide in African societies and how they’ve affected contemporary campaigns for reparations and the nature of sovereignty on the continent.

“I chose to pursue this project at to work with leading scholars of restorative justice at I-GMAP and to contribute to the University’s longstanding expertise in Africana studies through a focus on downstream atrocity prevention,” he said.