Invitation

The Sophie project encourages outside collaboration and welcomes contributions of texts, creative works, and mementos of German heritage. Additionally, all funding contributions are greatly appreciated. Investing in the Sophie project supports today’s students and the effort to construct a more complete understanding of women’s creative efforts. Your support helps to preserve many of the artistic and literary riches of the past which otherwise might be irretrievably lost.

We invite you to contribute either to the general Sophie Endowment Fund, or to any of the special projects and initiatives listed on this page. Please help future students by allowing us to reclaim this piece of the past.

Donations

If you would like to make a donation, arrangements can be made with the Sophie Project Director. Please contact Michelle James at michelle_James@byu.edu or call (801) 422-2463.

Donors...

Projects that need funding...

• General Endowment Fund
• Stipend for student webmaster and computer specialist
• Sophie Jewish Women's Initiative
• Sophie Translation Initiative
• Sophie Pedagogy Initiative
• Stipend for Student Editor
• Student Travel Scholarships and Research Stipends for students researching in Europe
• Oral History Collection Project
• Writing Prizes
• Sophie Museum
• Click for more information...

Suggestions for Instructors

1.     The Sophie Digital Library is designed as a source for texts that can be used in instruction. You may use any of the texts on the website for instructional purposes. Having the text available online makes it unnecessary to prepare packets, readers, etc. Just have your students access the texts online; they may print out any text they wish for academic purposes.

2.     As an electronic text, each text can be searched for words, names, etc, and crunched for different kinds of analyses.

3.     We have kept the texts as close to their original forms as possible, allowing the students to experience original text-per-page, archaic terms and spelling, etc. Whenever we have transcribed the texts, we have updated the font. So there are texts available where there is no need for students to learn Fraktur-Schrift. 

4.     We have begun to focus increasingly upon shorter texts, which are much more appropriate to a classroom setting. For instructional use, we suggest essays, stories, and letters, as well as journalistic works and poems from Brinker-Gabler’s collection.

5.     Music and images can be downloaded and recorded for academic and instructional purposes.

6.     We encourage you to use the Sophie Digital Library as a training-ground for young researchers. The editors of the Sophie Journal will gladly review and web-publish your students’ well-written biographical sketches, bibliographies, introductions, etc. This will allow them to be a part of the research of Early Women’s Literature. There is no minimum age or academic degree for publication. We encourage submission from undergraduates, grad students, high-school teachers, lecturers, researchers, professors and all literature enthusiasts.

7.     Your lesson plans, syllabi, quizzes, study guides, Power-Point presentations, etc. are an important part of making these texts accessible to other instructors and students. The more supporting instructional material you can supply to the Sophie Journal, the easier it is for instructors to use these women’s works in the classroom, thus pulling the works and the authors out of obscurity. We will link your instructional aids directly to the work, making it more accessible to others who are looking for women’s literature to add to their courses.