Established on 09.18.2022 by Jeffrey P. Brown '78 and Patricia C. Calvert-Brown
Denise E. Brown (French Education, Class of 2009) was born and raised in California. Studying in Minnesota was never in her plans.
Coming from a family of musicians, Denise showed early talent as a singer. In addition to participating in musical theatre, she was a long-time member of a prominent Southern California youth chorus program that led to her singing on concert tours in the United States, Europe, and Australia.
Denise also was keenly interested in languages and started studying French while in junior high school. When it came time to decide about college, she considered many on the West Coast and only investigated Concordia because her dad, Jeffrey P. Brown (Class of 1978), asked for a recruitment packet to be sent to her. Within days of receiving it, she had decided that Concordia was her future, in spite of the location, and didn’t apply anywhere else.
While at Concordia, Denise was active in the French Club, afterschool French tutoring at Fargo-Moorhead schools and anything else French-related that was available, including a French May Seminar to Cameroon and living in Rennes, in northwestern France, for a summer. She also studied music and sang with Concordia choirs every year.
After graduating from Concordia, Denise worked for AmeriCorps in the Twin Cities, helping minority high school students prepare for and apply to college. After a year, she was accepted into graduate school at Bowling Green State University. A unique feature of the program was spending an academic year in France as a student at the University of Tours. At BGSU, she taught two sections of undergraduate French while finishing her MA in French Language and Literature.
Returning to California, Denise taught French and English at the high school and college levels, studied Italian and Mandarin, taught English in China to 300 middle school students, and pursued graduate study in linguistics. She returned to Cameroon on a Fulbright Foundation study trip for French teachers, which led to her transcribing native songs for teachers to use in their global studies lessons. She also followed her lifelong love of animals, working as a veterinary technician with a special interest in wildlife rescue and rehabilitation.
The Denise E. Brown ’09 Endowed Scholarship for French is awarded by the Office of Financial Aid to one or more students majoring or minoring in French.
† - Testamentary endowments may not be contributed to until they are fully established.