Class Notes Digest
The latest news from you
In Service
In the early 1990s, Liz Fanning (CAS’87) spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small Moroccan village. The experience stayed with her. In 2011, she launched CorpsAfrica, which operates in Malawi, Morocco, Rwanda, and Senegal. Based on the Peace Corps model, but focused on local volunteers instead of Americans, the organization places young Africans in their own countries.
Volunteers spend 10 months in a remote village, working with the residents to identify and carry out a project. These have ranged from creating $500 wells for potable water in Malawi to CorpsAfrica’s biggest endeavor yet: constructing a $30,000 basketball court in an overcrowded refugee camp in Malawi.
After 10 years, the organization has grown to include a staff of more than 20, while volunteers have completed more than 200 projects. And Fanning has twice been recognized by the organization that got her started. The National Peace Corps Association awarded her the Sargent Shriver Award for Distinguished Humanitarian Service in 2019 and in May 2022, the Peace Corps presented her with its John F. Kennedy Service Award—an honor it bestows every five years.
Fanning’s ultimate goal: 250 volunteers in each of the continent’s 54 countries—13,500 volunteers annually—within the next decade. “There are young people already there and they’re looking for ways to be part of the solution,” she says. A new grant from the Mastercard Foundation will allow the organization to expand into Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Uganda over the next few years.
Read an extended version of this story here.
Malcolm “Mal” Coles (CAS’66) received a BU Distinguished Alumni Award at October’s Alumni Weekend. He has more than 50 years of experience with national service and volunteer organizations, starting as a volunteer for VISTA. In 1993, he worked for the White House Office of National Service as it launched the AmeriCorps program. The federal agency supports more than 250,000 volunteers annually. Coles most recently served as acting CEO of AmeriCorps.
Your Books
Featured Book
In February 2020, after more than two years of work, Weike Wang (GRS’16) turned in her eagerly anticipated second novel to her publisher.
Less than a month later, New York City was overtaken by the pandemic—and so, essentially, was Wang’s book, Joan Is Okay (Random House, 2022). The heroine, Joan, is a self-effacing, misunderstood, workaholic Chinese American physician who is deeply devoted to her job in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Manhattan.
That first version of Wang’s 224-page novel contained no mention of the word COVID.
But Wang didn’t freak out. This was perhaps not surprising for an author who earned a PhD in public health from Harvard and an MFA from BU at the same time, and whose acclaimed first novel, Chemistry (Knopf, 2017), won the Whiting and PEN/Hemingway Awards. Instead, she got to work interviewing her Asian American physician friends who were on the front lines of the pandemic and making revisions.
“I realized I couldn’t write about this occupation without recognizing this big event,” Wang says.
At BU, one of her mentors was Ha Jin (GRS’93), a CAS professor of English and creative writing. “[He] told me the second novel is the hardest one to write,” Wang says. “The second one was pretty hard.”
Two years after Wang first turned in the manuscript, Joan Is Okay finally hit the bookshelves.
—Sara Rimer
Fiction:
Helaine (Swarbick) Mario (CAS’68), Shadow Music; Elizabeth McCracken (CAS’88, GRS’88), The Hero of This Book
Nonfiction:
Randall Beach (CAS’72), The Legendary Toad’s Place: Stories from New Haven’s Famed Music Venue; Loyd Grossman (CAS’72), The Artist and the Eternal City: Bernini, Pope Alexander VII, and the Making of Rome; Peter Ho Davies (GRS’94), The Art of Revision: The Last Word; Marian Leah Knapp (CAS’60), Prohibition Wine: A True Story of One Woman’s Daring in Twentieth-Century America; Rose Opengart (CAS’90), Find Your Where: Turn the Tables, Negotiate Your Success, and Do Work and Life on Your Own Terms; Jeff Sheehan (CAS’85), Customer Experience Management Field Manual: The Guide For Building Your Top Performing CX Program; John Torday (CAS’68), The Singularity of Nature: A Convergence of Biology, Chemistry and Physics; James Turcotte (CGS’78, CAS’80), Four Brothers From Lowell; Gerald W. R. Ward (GRS’75,’84), Family Treasures: 175 Years of Collecting Art and Furniture at the New England Historic Genealogical Society
Poetry:
John Arsenault (CAS’96), with Eric Wade Jones, Corona-ku: A Quarantined Conversation in Haiku; Martin Edmunds (GRS’08), Flame in a Stable; Shin Yu “Doris” Pai (CAS’97), Virga
Children:
Meryl Meyer (CAS’69), Their Secret to Keep
Young Adult:
Lee S. (Schwartz) Varon (CAS’72), My Brother Is Not a Monster: A Story of Addiction and Recovery
On Screen
Chris Aiola (CAS’07, COM’07) produced two Emmy-nominated Netflix documentary series—Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak and Connected: The Hidden Science of Everything.
Overlooked No More
Melody T. McCloud (CAS’77, CAMED’81) of Roswell, Ga., submitted Rebecca Lee Crumpler (CAMED 1864), the first Black woman to graduate from a US medical school, to be featured in the New York Times “Overlooked” obituary series. She was eventually contacted by Cindy Shmerler, who wrote about Crumpler. McCloud, an obstetrician-gynecologist, has been working to raise awareness of Crumpler’s accomplishments. She successfully urged Virginia Governor Ralph Northam to declare March 30, 2019, “Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler Day,” and has advocated for the construction of a monument to her in Richmond, Va. McCloud also curated an exhibition about Crumpler’s career at the BU Aram V. Chobanian & Edward Avedisian School of Medicine.
In the Archives
Catherine Devlin (CAS’22) spent this past summer researching the history of CAS in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. Her work will be used by the college on its website and publication. We’ve included some of her archival discoveries in this issue of arts&sciences (see pages 8–11). “Having just graduated from BU with a history degree, I was excited to learn more about my alma mater,” Devlin says. “Throughout my research, I was especially impressed by CAS’ longstanding atmosphere of vitality, both in and out of the classroom. Since its inception, CAS has been willing to adjust to changing times, and its students have maintained a sense of community engagement and school spirit.”
Devlin is pursuing a master’s in gender history as a Fulbright Postgraduate Grantee at the University of Glasgow. She will be expanding on her undergraduate honors thesis by identifying stories of forgotten female peace activists and using them to examine how we remember women’s history. “I am so thankful for my time at BU for both encouraging my intellectual curiosity in raising historical questions and equipping me with the tools to go about answering them,” she says.