Veronika Wirtz (from left), photo courtesy of Wirtz; Yuri Corrigan, photo by Jackie Ricciardi; and Alexis Peri, photo by Cydney Scott

Commencement 2024

Introducing the Winners of the 2024 Metcalf Awards, BU’s Top Teaching Honors

Professors from SPH and CAS recognized for mentoring and encouraging students to build critical thinking skills and friendships

To ease his students into discussing the works of 19th-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, Yuri Corrigan has figured out a few ice-breaker questions to get the class talking and thinking about the themes they’ll be exploring in the texts: “Do you ever feel like you’re watching your life from a distance, and not living inside of it?” or “Do you share your parents’ values?” 

Corrigan, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of Russian and comparative literature, hopes that by the time the class opens War and Peace or Anna Karenina, they’ll realize that the themes Tolstoy wrote about are ones we struggle with today. 

“In my class, I try to get the students to think about what a good conversation is,” says Corrigan, who grew up in an immigrant family in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. “I think that helps students [realize] that we’re not there to take in ready-made information. We’re here to start a conversation with an author or with a text that will sustain us for years to come.”

Corrigan’s dedication to improving the classroom experience has earned him this year’s Metcalf Cup and Prize, the University’s highest teaching award. He will be honored at the 2024 Commencement ceremony on May 19 alongside two other faculty members—Veronika Wirtz, a School of Public Health professor of global health, and Alexis Peri, a CAS associate professor of history—the recipients of this year’s Metcalf Awards for Excellence in Teaching. 

Created in 1973, the Metcalf Cup and Prize and the Metcalf Awards for Excellence in Teaching are a gift from the late Arthur G. B. Metcalf (Wheelock’35, Hon.’74), a BU Board of Trustees chair emeritus and a former professor. The program gives $10,000 to the Cup and Prize winner and $5,000 each to the Metcalf Award winners. A University committee selects winners based on statements of the nominees’ teaching philosophy, supporting letters from colleagues and students, and classroom observations of the nominees.

Yuri Corrigan, College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of Russian and comparative literature

For Corrigan, teaching literature is an opportunity to break through the noise of TikTok, the 24/7 news cycle, and texting. He says his ultimate goal is to “cultivate long-term skills”—to encourage his students to be better writers and thinkers and “to foster moral and intellectual infrastructures for their daily lives.”

In reviewing Corrigan’s nomination packet, “the repeated feedback from students is that [his] courses changed their lives,” wrote committee chair Amie Grills, BU associate provost for undergraduate affairs, noting that faculty who observed his classes say he “performs magic.” In a supporting letter, a student wrote, ​​“Every time I take a class with him I come out with a new understanding and appreciation for life—what more could you ask for from a university experience during the most pivotal years of your life?”

Nominators made it clear that Corrigan cares about his students’ happiness and well-being as much as their academic careers. He organizes pods so that students have dedicated classmates to reach out to should a homework question arise, and then he mandates that the pods meet for coffee twice a semester. Before long, friendships form. 

“What I really strive for is that when I walk into the class, they’re not all silently looking at their phones,” Corrigan says. “If they’re engaged in conversation already, then something good is going on.”

Veronika Wirtz, School of Public Health professor of global health

During her grad school training at the University of London, Wirtz says, she had fantastic mentors who pointed her in career directions she hadn’t considered before. She strives to do the same today for her School of Public Health students through engaging classes incorporating tabletop exercises and lively discussion, visits from professionals working in the field, and thoughtful mentoring.

Wirtz has founded and coordinated several mentoring initiatives at SPH, including the Emerging Women Leaders program, which connects doctoral students with leaders in the public health sector. Her Metcalf nominators cite her ability to form lifelong relationships with many of her students and help them connect with other academic units at BU, the College of Engineering and the Pardee School of Global Studies among them.

“For me, it’s very important to genuinely engage and to get to know the students, just as I would engage with colleagues,” says Wirtz, an expert on ensuring access to medicines in developing countries. “I’ve had many encounters with students where they said, ‘Oh, wow! I didn’t know that I had that strength’ or ‘I didn’t know I could bridge those two disciplines.’ I think it is through these types of encounters and talks that you discover with them what they might want to do and how they can bring their strengths to the professional field.”

Before the start of each semester, Wirtz asks her new students to fill out a questionnaire so she can tailor the syllabus to their backgrounds and interests. “This makes them much more open to engaging in building a learning community…where people are inspired to come with questions and share.” 

Unsurprisingly, the Metcalf award isn’t Wirtz’s first teaching accolade. Just last year, SPH awarded her the Excellence in Research Mentoring Award and the Excellence in Teaching Award for Dedication to Student Learning.

In their evaluation, a student described Wirtz’s course as the best class they’d taken at SPH. “Veronika not just vocalized but showed that she prioritized our learning and our professional development,” the student wrote. “She created such a supportive learning environment” and helped “promote and spark amazing conversations.” In observing one of Wirtz’s classes, one Metcalf committee member noted, “I felt that people were there to figure out how to change the world.”

Alexis Peri, CAS associate professor of history

Peri, a historian who focuses on modern Russia and Eastern Europe (especially the Soviet period), says that when she started teaching, she was hyper-focused on ensuring her students memorized the content. But after teaching for more than 15 years, she says, she is “much more interested in seeing how students grow in their confidence and their ability to write and analyze.”

The Metcalf nominating committee says Peri’s creative assignments are one of the hallmarks of her teaching. One of her assignments challenged students to write fictional dating and social media profiles for famous historical figures, like Catherine the Great. In her Experiencing Total War class, Peri has the students form a historical character living through both World War I and World War II and then write installments of the person’s life, thinking about how the two wars would shape the way that person grew and developed through the decades. This semester, to help her students keep track of the timeline of President Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, Peri told her students to write the Russian dictator’s résumé. 

“We talked about what skills he would list as well as what things he might want to conceal on his résumé,” Peri says. “It was a more fun approach that yielded greater intellectual results and more thinking as a result.” She thinks creative work is one of the best ways to engage all aspects of a student’s intelligence and experience, she says, and it can be deceptively challenging, requiring a deeper level of thinking than memorization.

“Alexis is known among her students as an ‘engaging and thoughtful facilitator’ with a sensitive approach to heavy themes that helps students feel comfortable sharing ideas and learning together how to craft questions, hone research skills, and adapt to information and feedback,” her nomination letter says. “Many students shared that their writing skills transformed with her guidance.”

Peri says she approaches teaching the same way she works and writes as a historian—by telling stories and reconstructing not just what the world looked like and the events that happened, but also how it felt and why people reacted to it the way they did. 

“Once students connect to a story or a storyteller, then that opens up all of these possibilities for greater empathy with those who came before us and opens up a lot of possibilities for deeper understanding and appreciation,” she says. “It can also give them the ability to criticize and condemn on a more thoughtful level. So I think that there are all kinds of ways that reckoning with the past makes us more effective citizens and more effective people.”