Stanley Ann Dunham — the mother of America's next president — was finally recognized for the outstanding graduate work she did at the University of Hawai'i a decade after her death.

In September, people who knew Dunham and strangers who admired her adventuresome spirit and scholarly achievements as a UH anthropology undergraduate and doctoral candidate organized a UH seminar called "Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham: An Extraordinary Woman and Her Work."

Organizers had to change the location twice to accommodate the overflow crowd.

The seminar was the idea of women's studies professor Meda Chesney-Lind, who did not know Dunham but works in the same Saunders Hall where Dunham studied at UH.

"I have been enthralled that she did such fascinating work in the building where I work," Chesney-Lind said at the time. "Barack Obama has made no secret of the fact that his mother was important in his life and helped shape his perspective. ... She is a significant figure in women's history in Hawai'i and we need to take a look at her and be proud of her as a UH-Manoa student and show our female students that they can do anything."

Dunham had divorced Obama's father and was raising young Barack in the early 1960s, while finishing her bachelor's degree in anthropology at UH.

She was fascinated by Indonesian textiles and handicrafts and learned to speak Indonesian and some Javanese at UH.

She then fell in love with another UH master's degree student named Soetoro Martodihardjo, who went by the Javanese nickname "Lolo" Soetoro.

As the people at UH organized September's seminar, Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng said, "There was a recognition that we could change the world by helping as many people as possible in the lower economic tiers to empower themselves so they could have some decision-making power over their own lives. Our mother's work greatly influenced my brother's commitment to service and to inclusiveness and to grass-roots democracy, obviously democratic decision-making. Those commitments were certainly imbedded in his list of priorities, in part because of her example."

Dunham's interest in Indonesian textiles inspired her to help arrange loans as small as $50 for artisans to bring in innovations such as electricity and machinery, which revolutionized the way they did business.

Her doctoral dissertation focused on blacksmiths along the southern coast of Java who made farm and kitchen tools out of scrap iron from abandoned bridges, buildings and railroads.

Dunham understood that the blacksmiths could import enough scrap iron for their entire village and sell the leftovers to other villages if they could first buy a truck for $1,000 that would take them to other, more distant sources.

Working with organizations such as the Ford Foundation and Bank Rakyat Indonesia, Dunham changed the lives of craftsmen.

"It was an extraordinary childhood," Soetoro-Ng said last year. "She was such an interesting and vigorously intellectual woman. I owe everything to her example. Her life of service is something to which we should all aspire."