Joseph Fewsmith III, a professor emeritus of international relations and political science (left), and Jeremy Murray-Brown, an associate professor of film and television.

Remembering Pardee’s Joseph Fewsmith III, COM’s Jeremy Murray-Brown, and Wheelock’s Florence Rossman

Joseph Fewsmith III
Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies

Joseph Fewsmith III, a professor emeritus of international relations and political science at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, died on November 4, 2025, at 76.

Fewsmith earned a bachelor’s degree at Northwestern University and a master’s and PhD at the University of Chicago. After working as an analyst for the US Foreign Broadcast Information Service, he arrived at BU in 1991 as one of the three East Asia–focused social scientists. At the time, Pardee was still in its nascent phase as the international relations department in the College of Arts & Sciences, according to Pardee. His areas of expertise included comparative politics, Chinese domestic politics, and foreign policy.

He was the author of several books on China, including Forging Leninism in China: Mao and the Remaking of the Chinese Communist Party, 1927–1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Rethinking Chinese Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He was a member of the editorial board for many journals, including the China Quarterly and the Journal of Contemporary China, and Journal of Asian Studies. 

Fewsmith also was an associate of BU’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He retired from BU in 2025.

Jeremy Murray-Brown
College of Communication

Jeremy Murray-Brown, a television journalist, documentarian, and retired College of Communication associate professor of film and television, died on October 27, 2025, at 93. 

Murray-Brown was a producer at BBC Television, contributing to high-profile programs, such as the current affairs show Panorama. 

“He traveled to dozens of countries as a BBC documentarian, once getting tossed into a Paris prison by jittery gendarmes the day Charles de Gaulle returned to France, and another time hitching a ride to his Moscow hotel on the back of a Soviet tank on May Day,” according to his published obituary. 

As a freelancer, he worked on a broad array of projects, such as Portraits of Power, a 26-part series on 20th-century leaders. He published books, including Kenyatta (Dutton, 1973), a portrait of Kenya’s first president, and Faith and the Flag: The Opening of Africa (Allen & Unwin, 1977). 

Murray-Brown joined the COM faculty in 1982. He was a dedicated teacher, known for his keen interest in his students’ ideas and aspirations, his probing intellect, and his gift for sharing the power of nonfiction storytelling through film, according to his obituary. He retired from teaching in 2007.

Florence Rossman (Wheelock’80)
Wheelock College of Education & Human Development

Florence Patricia Rossman, who taught at Wheelock for 29 years, died on July 22, 2025. She was 80. 

Rossman was born on February 7, 1945, in Sewell, Chile, where her father was a supervisor at the local copper mine. She was born with spina bifida; after moving back to the US with her family, she underwent several surgeries to improve her physical abilities. (According to her obituary, Rossman was one of the longest survivors of spina bifida.) She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in childhood education at St. Cloud State University. 

She became a faculty member of Wheelock College, before its 2018 merger with Boston University, and earned a PhD in education. She taught at the college for 29 years and was director of the Teaching of Reading program. She also earned a law degree from New England Law. 

“Florence—or Dr. Rossman as she was known by most at Wheelock—was an institution, already a very well established and known faculty by the time I joined Wheelock in 1988,” says Eleonora Villegas-Reimers, a Wheelock clinical professor and chair of the teaching and learning department. “She was the director of our Teaching of Reading program for many, many years, a person who had a significant impact on many students in education, as everyone needed to take reading courses. She was very strict with students (and with the administration!), and yet a very giving, funny, and thoughtful person…who, even in the worst of the discussions, would be fair. She had a terrific sense of humor, and that helped a lot. She was an outstanding teacher.”