In Memoriam

Associate Professor Michael Corgan, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies

From Professor of International Relations & Political Science and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs William W. Grimes

Professor Michael Corgan died at the age of 77 on November 20, 2018 due to complications from surgery. Mike was a larger than life figure, a legendary teacher, and an exceptional colleague and friend.

Mike followed a circuitous route into academia. Growing up as an “army brat” in the U.S. and Germany, he followed the call of duty, attending the U.S. Naval Academy and serving as a naval officer for 26 years. He served two tours in Vietnam, one as the commander of a riverboat (where he earned a Bronze Star) and the other as vice-rector of the Vietnamese Naval Academy. Equally formative were his postings to Keflavik, Iceland and to Boston University. He came to BU in 1985, as Commander of the Naval ROTC battalion, where he began to take classes in political science. When his tour was up, he made the decision to stay at BU. He threw himself into Ph.D. studies while working at the Metropolitan College to cover the bills, completing his degree in 1991. He was hired by first the Political Science Department and then the Department of International Relations (predecessor to the Pardee School) to teach important required classes, becoming a full-time lecturer in IR in 1995 and later Associate Professor.

Hiring Mike turned out to be one of the best choices IR ever made. Over 9500 students took Introduction to International Relations with Mike over the more than 20 years that he taught it—even though it was taught at 8:00 a.m. for nearly the entire time and even though he had the strictest attendance and tardiness policies of any professor I have known. Mike had several things going for him as the instructor of one of the largest classes on campus. One was his ability to command a room; he was a big guy who had a big, booming voice and the confidence of command. He also knew how to train, manage, and inspire a corps of TFs to work as a team to provide excellent instruction to the section level. Most important, he was a communicator. He managed to communicate complex ideas to college freshmen without dumbing them down while keeping them interested and laughing along the way. Mike was known for his humor and love of his students, but he also expected a lot from his students. Certainly, some students would have preferred more coddling. A student complained once to Mike that Mike expected too much of 22 year-olds. Mike shot back, “When I was 22, I was responsible for the lives of 12 men in a riverboat in Vietnam.” And his all-time favorite student comment was, “He’s so arrogant, he thinks he knows more than we do!” But Mike was playing the long game of character development, and he played it very well. He would regularly receive notes of thanks from alumni for the lessons they had learned from him, even when some of those lessons had involved bad grades or tough comments.

Over the course of his academic career, Mike also produced original research that has contributed to our knowledge of the politics of Scandinavia and the Arctic Circle—a region that may sound niche but has become a key area of contestation and potentially commerce in an era of global warming. Mike’s deep knowledge of maritime history, law, and practice, as well as his extensive connections among Scandinavian scholars, allowed particular insight into those issues.

Mike was also a fantastic colleague. He leaned in, taking on every duty he was asked to, serving as director of undergraduate studies for 12 years and associate chair for 3, and advising dozens of senior theses and MA Papers. Mike wanted to be a part of a mission he believed in, and he knew with certainty that educating the next generation is both a profound responsibility and a great privilege. He never took that privilege for granted.

Finally, it would be wrong to remember Mike without noting his great passions beyond politics and international relations. One was classical music, particularly the symphonies of Beethoven and Bruckner. He was equally interested in literature, and in fact was the first Naval Academy graduate ever to return to the Academy to teach English, rather than engineering, politics, or military history. He had a prodigious memory for music and poetry, which he attributed to the many lonely hours spent on watch on naval vessels. Another passion was Iceland, which he fell in love with when he was based in Keflavik in the early 1980s. He studied Icelandic, read all the sagas, and spent as much time as he could there, including several stints as visiting professor at the University of Reykjavik. Mike wrote extensively on Icelandic security, was a frequent commentator in Icelandic media, and knew everyone, from professors to government officials and diplomats to shopkeepers. He counted among his friends various ambassadors, foreign ministers, and even the president.

Mike’s death has left an enormous hole in the fabric of the Pardee School and in the lives of his many friends at BU. We are devastated to have lost him, but we also know just how fortunate we were to have had him in our lives for so many years.

Professor Emerita Adelaide Cromwell, Sociology

Please read about her legacy and impact on the University at BU Today.

Professor Emeritus Edwin Delattre, Philosophy

Please read about his legacy and life at the Wheelock College of Education & Human Development website.

Senior Lecturer Martin Fido, CAS Writing Program

From Master Lecturer Thomas Underwood

Martin Fido, a senior lecturer in the Writing Program, was the consummate literary critic and teacher: articulate, scholarly, textual, ethical, and loyal. He held two Oxford degrees, the first with high honors. Writing his thesis on Benjamin Disraeli under the tutelage of Lord David Cecil, he became a “baby Don” at Oxford for three years when, in 1958, he was awarded the prestigious Andrew Bradley Junior Research Fellowship in English at Balliol College.

Martin expressed a profound commitment to the English language. He expressed a love for the English language in and of itself, for its structure, for its sound, its inflection. His “Leading Britain’s Conversation” radio show ran to great acclaim for fourteen years and won him a generation of listeners devoted to his remarkable speaking voice. That voice carried into his many books exploring British literature, history, and culture. When he was at work on his second book on Dickens and under a pressing deadline, he learned how to absorb and to synthesize sources before dictating directly into a tape recorder. Read or heard, his voice was music to the ears. He was a master grammarian. His publishers stopped sending his manuscripts out for professional proofreading because doing so was simply unnecessary. Martin Fido was multimodal before there was a BU HUB. We in the Arts & Sciences Writing Program mourn his departure, yet we take comfort in the high standards he bequeathed to his colleagues and to which he held his devoted students.

Research Professor Marilyn Gaull, Editorial Institute

From Professor of English and Editorial Institute Codirector Archie Burnett

Marilyn Gaull, a research professor at the Editorial Institute, died on August 14, 2019 at the age of 81 after a 12-year ordeal with cancer. In all that difficult time, she showed unwavering fortitude and courage, and when I last saw her in the summer, though she was very frail, she was set on regaining her vigor to return in the fall semester. It was not to be.

She taught at the College of William & Mary, Temple University, and New York University before coming to Boston University in 2007. She was never an employee of BU: she had a private endowment that required only that she hold an academic appointment, which meant that we got a substantial something for next to nothing. In 1970 she founded the quarterly journal The Wordsworth Circle and single-handedly edited it for nearly fifty years. Just this year she was delighted when the University of Chicago Press took over its publication. She was also the general editor of Palgrave-Macmillan’s series Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters, several volumes of which won coveted prizes. Her own major book, English Romanticism: The Human Context appeared in 1988 and remains very influential. It would be a mistake, however, to think of Marilyn as exclusively a literary scholar; her range encompassed intellectual history, the history of science, folklore, and oral performance, among other things. If you wanted a keynote address on the relation between mathematics and literature in the nineteenth century, she was the person to go to. At the Editorial Institute, she voluntarily taught a course entitled Editing and Publishing, which covered all aspects of the publication process. The class was organized as a publishing firm, and the course documentation was the most comprehensive I have ever seen.

On a personal note, I recall all our lunches together, which were wickedly gossipy and joyous, and those of us who were her immediate colleagues will miss the emails signed “Love, Marilyn.” She was, I always thought, the person for whom the adjective feisty had been invented. In stature she was small, but her presence was large. We mourn her absence all the more for that.

Professor Anthony Janetos, Earth & Environment

To read about Professor Janetos’ legacy at BU and in the field of environmental science, please see BU Today.

Professor Jacqueline Liederman, Psychological & Brain Sciences

From Professor Leslie R. Brody

Jackie and I arrived at BU in the same year, 1978, 41 years ago, as young assistant professors in our late twenties. We grew up together in our years at BU, sharing many personal and professional milestones. She received her B.A. in psychology from Queens College of the City University of New York in 1971, graduating summa cum laude with distinction, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She completed her Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Rochester in 1977. She joined the BU Psychology Department in September 1978 and was also a faculty member in the Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience, the Behavioral Neuroscience Program, and the Department of Applied Linguistics. She was active in promoting women in science in all of her many roles, as well as through the BU organization ARROWS. She also served as Chair of the Ph.D. program in Brain, Behavior, and Cognition from 1996 to 2006 and was short-listed for the Boston University Metcalf Teaching Award and received the Templeton Student Advising Award and the Dean’s Excellence in Teaching award.

Jackie had an exuberant and vibrant energy. She was curious and passionate about all manner of things related to psychology and was a tireless source of support for our department and her colleagues’ work and potential. In her career at BU, she mentored, taught, and collaborated with hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students and many faculty members, inspiring them with her passion and excitement for teaching, researching and discovering new information about the functioning and development of the brain. She published almost 80 papers on developmental neuropsychology and neurodevelopmental disorders, investigating how genetics, sex ratios, birth order, and prenatal and early postnatal experiences contributed to the onset of neurodevelopmental disorders. This work took her to the Faroe Islands, where she investigated the development of babies whose mothers who had ingested high levels of PCBs during pregnancy as a result of eating whale blubber.

Her students remember her as inspirational and rigorous, as she challenged them to be curious and to engage in critical analysis. A former student wrote, “I felt that I learned every time I heard her talk;” and others observed that “Jackie was a great mentor and believed in me;” “Jackie had a profound influence on my life and my career;” and “Jackie sparked my interest in neuropsychology and changed the course of my studies and my future.” A colleague noted that “she kept track of students for decades, spoke of past students with love and pride, and continued to be a guiding force for them.” Other colleagues remembered her as “brilliant,” “extraordinarily kind,” “supportive,” “upbeat,” “witty,” “wry,” “self-reflective,” “realistic,” “honest,” and as “having a wonderful sense of humor.” One described her as “a true intellectual who found science thrilling;” another as “fearless and tenacious. She fought to protect the people around her and made us all better.” And finally, she was described as a “brilliant, selfless academic whose entire focus was on shining intellectual light into dark corners, and bringing good to the world in every way that she could.”

Jackie faced a number of health challenges, including her final illness, Parkinson’s disease, with optimism, determination, and a commitment to living life fully. Even in the last few months of her life, when she was very ill, she was living life to the fullest, taking classes, doing exercises, attending faculty meetings. When she retired on disability, I wrote to wish her well, and she told me how much she missed work but how much better she was feeling, and then she turned the conversation quickly around to me, letting me know how kind I was to write and how much more resilient she thought I was than she in facing my own health challenges. Her response represented some of her essential qualities: being upbeat, self-effacing, modest, and a validating and supportive colleague and friend. She was an essential part of my life at BU for the past 40 years, and I will miss her greatly. The loss to her family, Les Kaufman, a professor in the Biology Department, and her son, Justin, a 2009 BU graduate, is immeasurable, and our sympathies go out to them. Her legacy will live on in the generations of students whose lives she touched and in the work of innumerable scholars who are building on her research findings. Our department, the BU community, and the world are diminished with her loss.

Professor Emeritus Augustus Richard Norton, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies

From Professor of International Relations & Political Science and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs William W. Grimes

Augustus Richard Norton died on February 20, 2019 at the age of 72. He was a highly influential scholar of the Middle East and of civil society, a frequent participant in policy debates, and an outstanding teacher, colleague, and mentor.

Richard began his adulthood as an enlisted man in the army. He was commissioned from the ranks in 1966 and served in the U.S. Army, including two combat tours in Vietnam from 1968-71, until he retired in 1993 as a colonel. Returning from Vietnam, he turned to scholarship—earning his BA and MA degrees at the University of Miami, serving as an ROTC instructor, studying Arabic intensively in Monterey, and earning his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Chicago in 1984. Along the way, he served in 1980–81 as a United Nations observer with the UN Truce Supervision Organization in southern Lebanon. Upon his return from Lebanon, he joined the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York and taught there until 1993, rising to the rank of professor of comparative politics and Middle Eastern studies. He then joined the faculty of Boston University as a professor of international relations, and later of anthropology as well.

Richard made an enormous mark on the study of the politics of the Middle East and of civil society in Muslim societies. He sought to understand the cross-currents of the region from the bottom-up, looking at how residents of the Middle East organized at the local through national levels and how they understood their own worlds. He is most famous for two bodies of work: In the 1990s, Richard headed a widely-cited three-year project funded by the Ford Foundation that examined state-society relations in the Middle East and the question of civil society in the region. The project resulted in his edited two-volume study, Civil Society in the Middle East, which set a research agenda for a generation of scholars. Empirically, he was probably best known for his work on Lebanon’s Hezbollah, including the widely cited Hezbollah: A Short History in 2007. He also published extensively in journals across multiple disciplines, as well as Current History, of which he was a contributing editor for over 25 years. Richard also made a mark as an organizer and convenor, working tirelessly to bring together scholars and practitioners from across the United States and Middle East. He participated in several Council on Foreign Relations task forces, and he was the main academic convener for the annual joint State Department-NSA conferences on the Middle East and South Asia from 1996 to 2008. These were no-holds-barred events on policy related to Muslim-world affairs, and they were the centerpiece of the Clinton and Bush administrations outreach on policy matters to the academic and thinktank communities.

Richard seemed fearless, as befitted a man who had been on the battlefield and was a scholar of one of the most contentious regions of the world. He was unfailingly courteous but never shrank from an argument just because it was unpopular or was opposed by someone in authority. Here at BU, he stood strongly for faculty governance, administrative transparency, and procedure. When he had a case to make in a faculty meeting, he was always extraordinarily prepared and would advocate his position strongly. Most of the time, he was right, and those around him realized it. But when he was on the losing side of a vote, that was that. He was a man of honor, and honor meant accepting a decision and moving on. Richard’s toughness and courtesy were essential to his professional career. Richard had friends, colleagues, and admiring opponents from across the Middle East and across the political spectrum. While he was often identified as sympathetic with Arab causes, he maintained strong personal bonds even with ardent supporters of Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza. When Richard spoke, people listened, even if they didn’t always want to agree.

Over time, he became increasingly suspicious of political science theorizing, in favor of the worldview and analytical tools of anthropology, which he saw as better able to make sense of the reality on the ground. He himself spent considerable time in the Middle East, including residences in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Lebanon. Perhaps most importantly, he listened to people from all walks of life.

In the fall of 2016, Richard learned he had a malignant brain tumor, and he taught his last class the following spring. Still, he remained active, albeit more selective about which projects he could take on. I leaned on him several times for guidance and help with a mid-tenure review, and he remained deeply engaged in BU’s Campagna-Kerven lecture series and securing the endowment to ensure its continuation in perpetuity. He even finished the second edition of his Hezbollah book.

Richard is dearly missed by all of us at the Pardee School, as well as his family, his students, his colleagues, and his friends around the world.

Professor Emeritus James Winn, English

From Associate Professor Michael Prince

James Anderson Winn, the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University from 2009 until his retirement in 2017, and professor emeritus of English, passed away on March 21, 2019 at the age of 71, to the profound sadness of scholars, colleagues, and former students here at Boston University and around the world.

James Winn was recruited to Boston University as chair of English in 1998, after holding distinguished faculty positions at Yale, where he received his Ph.D. in 1974, and at the University of Michigan, where he founded the Institute for the Humanities. James led the Department of English with distinction until 2007 and had a major role in building the department as it exists today. In 2008, he took over directorship of the Humanities Foundation, which he renamed the Boston University Center for the Humanities. In that role, he developed new programs and opportunities for faculty and graduate students, and I know that James’s successor, Professor Susan Mizruchi, joins me in lamenting the loss of a great leader in the humanities.

James was a wonderful colleague, immensely supportive of our work, and a devoted mentor of graduate students. He prided himself on his students’ success, securing tenure-track positions for them at colleges and universities nationwide. And they returned the love and devotion.

Those of us who have been here for a while will recall his witty introductions of new colleagues—in heroic couplets—and his farewell to a departing dean, also in heroic couplets. James was an accomplished flutist and music historian, and we recall the many concerts he gave, usually with his accompanist David Kopp from the College of Fine Arts, both here at BU and in the community.

If I may add a personal note, James was my friend and tennis buddy for 29 years (I am proud that he called me his buddy), and I miss him terribly. He was also a remarkable source of information and insight in the fields we share. Only a few months before he passed away, he insisted on reading an eighty-page chapter of mine on Robinson Crusoe and returned it in three days with his usual meticulous notes and corrections. I thought this was remarkable, until a recent graduate student of his told me just after his death, that he had returned a chapter of hers with comments two weeks before he passed. That was James.

But it is as a true scholar that James Winn will be most lastingly remembered. His biography of John Dryden, is, as one reviewer called it, “the most important biography of Dryden ever written.” James concludes John Dryden and His World with this wish: “I like to think Dryden would share my fondest hope for this book, that it will send readers back to his works with an improved relish for the subtlety, nuance, and power of one of our finest English writers.” This fond hope has become an accomplished fact: Winn’s multi-disciplinary life of Dryden redefined the possibilities of literary biography itself and will be cherished for as long as people study Dryden and read English literature. This towering achievement appeared early in James’s career when he was 40 and was followed by six books and fifty-some articles, culminating in his 2014 biography of Queen Anne, which likewise broke new ground in the multi-disciplinary study of culture.

James rose to every occasion, to all of the challenges and trials that life presented, including his last, which, as many of us witnessed, he faced with great courage and dignity. James Winn was a man of principle, who let his principles be known—a champion of the humanities and a great advocate for Boston University.