Willson-Broyles excels at finding the balance between humor and tragedy. Brianna Royle Kopka/B2 Photography

When Rachel Willson-Broyles MA’07, PhD’13 was growing up outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin, she fell under the spell of the Swedish band Ace of Base and decided “to learn about Sweden, because that’s where they were from.”

Some 15 years ago, as she was working toward her PhD in Scandinavian studies at UW–Madison, she took a seminar in translation in the Department of Comparative Literature. Scandinavian studies professor Susan Brantly suggested she translate a page or two of the 2006 novel Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger by a distinguished Swedish author, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, who was going to be visiting the UW–Madison campus.

“I’d already starting translating stuff by myself,” Willson-Broyles says, “articles and things. I really just loved the Swedish language.”

She took Brantly up on the offer, and when Khemiri arrived in Madison, the professor suggested she give the author her translated pages.

“I felt a little silly doing it,” Willson-Broyles says. “My student project.”

But two months later, Khemiri contacted her. He’d sent the pages to Knopf, the publisher with the English rights to the novel. An editor wanted to know if Willson-Broyles was a translator.

She replied, “I’d like to be a translator.”

Montecore was published in English, with Willson-Broyles as translator, in 2011.

That year, Khemiri told the New York Times, “Rachel excels at finding the balance between humor and tragedy, which I sometimes struggle with.” In the years since, Willson-Broyles, who lives in Saint Paul, has translated some 40 books from Swedish to English.

Among the most recent are two novels by the acclaimed crime author Christoffer Carlsson: Blaze Me a Sun — “the first great crime novel of 2023,” according to the New York Times — and 2024’s Under the Storm, which the Times reviewer described as “once more wonderfully translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles.”

As a full-time translator, Willson-Broyles says she can finish a book in about three months. The level of involvement with the writer varies. “Most authors are delighted to answer questions,” she says.

Willson-Broyles’s wish list includes seeing translators get more cover bylines and more consistent royalties — “not only for my career,” she says, “but for everyone who works in literary translation.”

Unsplash

UW–Madison graduates are everywhere. The very first international student was William Steward from Ancaster, Canada, who was among the 20 men in the first class in February 1849. There are currently 449,308 in the United States, and the university claims alumni in 166 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe — including one each in the tiny island nations of Kiribati and Aruba.

Below are the countries that boast the highest numbers of Badger grads.*

*Data current as of August 2022.

Herrera: “For decades to come Russia will be a pariah state, possibly facing charges of war crimes and genocide, and its economy will be seriously damaged.”

Yoshiko Herrera was earning her undergraduate degree at Dartmouth as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the Soviet Union faced dissolution. After a study-abroad visit to Eastern Europe in 1990 and a peek behind the crumbling Iron Curtain, Herrera switched academic tracks to study the “different world” she saw and the ethnic, national, and social groups within it. Now she’s an expert in Russian politics and a professor of political science at the UW, and the war in Ukraine has given her yet another post-Soviet conflict to study. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Herrera has done countless interviews for local and national news outlets to explain Russian president Vladimir Putin’s destructive actions and why she believes Ukrainians’ resolve for statehood will eventually prevail.

At the start of the invasion of Ukraine, you called Putin’s actions an “incredible miscalculation.” What did Putin miscalculate?

It’s a miscalculation based on a profound misunderstanding of Ukraine and a significant underestimation of the international reaction in terms of sanctions and military support for Ukraine. The lack of respect for sovereignty and nationhood in Ukraine led Putin and his military advisers to not seriously examine the situation, including assessing Ukraine’s likely resolve, military capabilities, and lack of support for a Russian occupation. Because the 2014 Crimea invasion was such a shock for Ukraine, Ukrainians realized the danger to their state and nation, and they largely got over some of their historic differences and built a more inclusive sense of Ukrainian national identity that’s not just based on ethnic or linguistic traits.

What are the consequences that Putin, and Russia more broadly, have faced?

Even if Ukraine doesn’t join NATO per se, it is going to remain strongly anti-Russian, which is the opposite of what Putin wanted. Plus, Finland and Sweden are now on track to join NATO. And every other country in Europe has been put on alert that Russia is a dangerous country, and they need to treat it as such. In many ways the results for Russia have been disastrous. Regardless of the outcome of the war, for decades to come Russia will be a pariah state, possibly facing charges of war crimes and genocide, and its economy will be seriously damaged. Ironically, a military defeat of Russia and Putin may be the best hope that Russia has to improve its prospects. But I want to emphasize the war has been a terrible, unprovoked, humanitarian and economic catastrophe for Ukraine.

How do you see this war ending? Do you expect to see peace anytime soon?

Right now, nobody really knows how long this can last. Unfortunately, I think both sides are very committed to fighting, so I don’t really see the prospect of a ceasefire or any negotiated settlement anytime soon. Ukrainians will not give up their state. The only question is to what extent they will be able to beat back Russian forces. On the Russian side, we see that there is no limit to Putin’s cruelty.

What do you believe is the United States’ role in this conflict?

Number one is in the coordination of international economic sanctions, especially with Europe, against Russia. There is more to be done on energy sanctions, and the U.S. should keep pressing on further secondary sanctions. Even though sanctions are not going to have an immediate effect on the war, they are going to weaken Russian state capacity and capabilities over the next few months or year.

Second is military support and weapons supply, and the U.S. is doing a lot, but Ukraine needs more help on this, and the U.S. should lead the way. There are a lot of reasons why Western governments might not be advertising everything they’re doing — I tend to be of the view that there is a lot going on behind the scenes that we are not aware of — but the military support from the West is absolutely critical to helping Ukraine win.

Humanitarian support for people in Ukraine, as well as displaced people, is important. There is also a major role for Europe and the U.S. in terms of supporting the rebuilding process in Ukraine. The world needs to hold Russia to account in terms of war crimes.

How should the United States navigate future relations with Russia?

As long as Putin is in power, we have to deal with a threatening, malevolent, untrustworthy government. There is no building trust with an untrustworthy regime, and hence the U.S. and Europe will have to act accordingly. One thing that is likely to change is that there has to be a long-term reconsideration of energy policy generally to [take] into account both the environment and these national security issues. Given the Russian threat, it is more important than ever that the U.S. have a coordinated national security policy with a reliable executive in the Oval Office.

Mildred crossed the Atlantic and enrolled in a doctoral program in Germany when she was 26, just as Hitler was rising to power. Appalled by the Nazi leader’s popularity, Mildred and Arvid began holding meetings in their Berlin apartment to discuss strategies of opposition. During the 1930s, their small, scrappy group intersected with three other resistance groups. By 1940, it was the largest underground resistance network in Berlin. In 1942, the Gestapo tracked them down. Arvid was hanged and Mildred was beheaded, the only American woman executed on Hitler’s direct order.

Mildred’s great-grandniece Rebecca Donner conducted extensive research, drawing on family records and archival documents in four countries — Germany, England, Russia, and the United States — to create a compelling chronicle of courageous resistance. Mildred tried to thwart Hitler by every means possible, recruiting Germans into the resistance, producing and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, helping Jews escape Germany, and becoming a spy in an effort to defeat one of the greatest evils of the 20th century.

National Archives and Records Administration

Donner’s book, which she describes as a fusion of biography, espionage thriller, and scholarly detective story, has won numerous literary awards and is now out in paperback. We have excerpted a section that depicts Mildred and Arvid’s time at the UW and their move to Germany after their marriage.

From the book All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner, published by Little, Brown & Company, an imprint of Hachette Books. Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Donner.

IT IS SEPTEMBER 1, 1932.
In exactly seven years, the Second World War will begin.

This morning, by comparison, is not noteworthy. For Mildred it begins, we may imagine, like any other morning as she rises from a simple, wood-frame bed to draw back the curtains, letting in the light. Because the apartment has wide windows, there is plenty of it, even in the dead of winter, when the air in Berlin seems grainy, the texture and hue of chalk. A narrow hallway leads to the main room, where Mildred drifts from window to window, drawing back curtains. Bookcases crammed with well-loved books line the walls. Oil paintings of dense forests bring rich splashes of gold and emerald to an otherwise modestly furnished room. Here is a sofa with wooden armrests. Here are two tattered rugs. A sturdy round table, two sturdy chairs. Floor planks show their wear, pitted in places, and creak under Mildred’s feet as she moves to the far corner of the room, where a white porcelain stove stands, its thick pipe stretching to the ceiling. Sometimes there’s coal, sometimes there’s not. Today, perhaps, there is. Mildred stokes the coal lumps with an iron rod, bringing up fresh sparks. The water in the kettle she sets on the stove is enough for two cups of coffee, one for her, one for Arvid.

It’s by force of habit that she does this. She is alone, though not for long. Arvid will return from his trip to Russia soon, in time for her birthday. She will be 30 — is it possible? — in just over two weeks.

Breakfast is simple, usually nothing more than a hunk of bread swiped with whatever’s on hand — jam, butter, mustard, she’s not particular. At the center of the table, she likes to put a flower or two in a glass of water. Tulips in spring, lilacs in summer, alpine roses in the fall, honeysuckle in winter. Sometimes the flowers are from her students. Sometimes they’re from Arvid.

Arvid is a romantic. It’s a side others don’t see. Others see a man who wears round, owlish spectacles and rarely leaves the house without a necktie. (Behind closed doors, he happily yanks it off.) Others see a man who spends hours on end at his desk. (But Arvid loves nothing more than to amble around a mountain on a Sunday afternoon, letting his thoughts wander, inhaling the tart, bracing air.) And though it’s true that Arvid is a man who loves the certitude of cold, hard facts, his head is stuffed with poetry. He was made to read Goethe as a boy and can now, at 31, recite long verses from memory, murmuring them into her ear.

They met at the University of Wisconsin, when Arvid wandered into the wrong lecture hall. He’d wanted to watch Professor John Commons deliver a lecture on American labor unions, but the person at the lectern wasn’t Commons. It was Mildred, then a 25-year-old graduate student. The topic of her lecture was American literature, and he stayed until the end. Then he approached the lectern and introduced himself.

She’d gotten a BA in humanities and started her master’s. He had a law degree and was on his way to getting a PhD in philosophy. After these preliminaries were out of the way, Arvid told her — with a sweet, tenderhearted formality that pierced her to the core — that his family home was in Jena, a small university town along the Saale River in Germany. He spoke English awkwardly, though earnestly. How different he was from the Midwestern boys at the UW, boys who tackled each other in cornfields and on football fields, boys who bragged about all the money they’d make with their degrees, boys who vied for Mildred’s attention with boisterous jokes — Har-dee-har-har! — that weren’t at all funny, at least not to her, although you were supposed to smile anyway, smile and blush and flip your hand and say, Oh, you’re such an egg.

The second time they saw each other, Arvid brought her a fistful of wildflowers. He’d picked them himself. “A great bunch of thick, white odorous flowers mingled with purple bells,” Mildred wrote later, remembering every detail.

Courtesy of the Donner Family

It was morning — a “beautiful” one. Arvid stood on the porch of the two-story house where Mildred rented a room. The house was near campus, owned by a professor who lived there with his wife and their two children. The wife peeked through the curtains, absorbing the sight of blue-eyed Arvid and his wildflowers. She’d taken a keen interest in Mildred’s private life. As Mildred worked doggedly on her master’s degree, the professor’s wife may have believed the younger woman could benefit from a little motherly guidance, mindful that the wrong man could lead her astray. Or maybe she was just nosy. At last she closed the curtains and nodded her frank approval. “Men from the North Sea,” she said, “make very good husbands.”

A husband — good or otherwise — was not what Mildred was looking for. Not now. She was still reeling from a heart-wrenching breakup with an anthropology major from Kansas City named Harry, but she stepped onto the porch anyway, shutting the door behind her. Arvid gave her the wildflowers and expressed his hope that Mildred was having a good morning. He labored to soften his German accent, and she realized that he’d practiced what he was about to say many times before coming to her door. He wanted to take her canoeing — on Lake Mendota, he said, “the greatest of all the lakes.”

His shy gallantry.

All right, she told him, with a shy smile of her own. She would join him in a canoe.

Six months later, on a Saturday, they said their vows under an improvised bower on a ramshackle dairy farm.

Arvid Harnack and Mildred Fish Harnack met on the UW campus and married soon afterward. They then moved to Germany, Arvid’s home country, just as Hitler was rising to power. Courtesy of the Donner family

Arvid returned to Germany to finish his PhD. Mildred would join him soon; Goucher College in Baltimore had hired her to teach English literature for the 1928–29 term. While they were apart, they wrote long letters. They described the books they were reading, their plans for the future. They would both become professors and teach in German universities, and perhaps American universities too. Mildred ended her letters with a drawing of a sun. Arvid ended his letters with the same sun.

THERE ARE MOMENTS — this morning may be one of them — when she misses Arvid with a force that takes her breath away. Right now, he’s probably eating breakfast too, seated at a table in Moscow with a group whose very name is a mouthful: Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft, or Working Group for the Study of the Soviet Planned Economy. (Mildred prefers to refer to the group by its less cumbersome acronym, ARPLAN.) Its members include economists, political scientists, literary critics, politicians, and playwrights, among them self-avowed right-wing ultranationalists and die-hard Communists. In other circumstances, these strange bedfellows might not have shaken hands, much less sat around a breakfast table, but Arvid is optimistic; they may disagree about methodology, but they are united in their aim.

Germany is in crisis. Something must be done. By studying what appears to be a novel economic solution to the Soviet Union’s woes, Arvid hopes to discover a remedy for the crisis in his own country. Arvid is secretary of ARPLAN. He receives no pay for this work, but his compassion for the poor in Germany and his desire to devise a new economic model to address this problem drive him to his desk day and night.

There are two desks in the apartment. Arvid’s is a great expanse of carved wood that once belonged to his father. The other desk, equally imposing, was once his maternal grandfather’s — Arvid calls him Grossvater Reichau. This is Mildred’s desk now. A big slab of mahogany. Lectures, articles, translations — she writes them all in longhand, filling page after page before turning to the typewriter.

It’s here, at Grossvater Reichau’s great slab of a desk, that Mildred stokes her own outsize dreams. One day she will be a great literary scholar; she will write magnificent books. The desk imparts heft and weight and stability, qualities that are entirely foreign to Mildred. She has no family heirlooms of her own. Whatever slim sticks of furniture had cluttered the small, drafty rooms of her childhood she has long since left behind.

MILDRED DOESN’T LINGER LONG over breakfast. A final swallow of coffee and she’s on her feet again, setting the cup and saucer in the sink, brushing crumbs from her lips. Dirty dishes will accumulate there for days before she notices them, a teetering tower of plates and cups and cutlery. There are always better things to do than the dishes.

She’s still wearing a bathrobe over her nightgown and long, boiled-wool stockings knit by her mother, who bundled them up in a trim package that took two months to make its way from a transatlantic steamer ship to her front door. Her feet skim the creaking floorboards — the heel of one stocking is wearing thin — as she walks to a wide window and opens it. The air, crisp as a cold apple, invigorates her. She flings off her bathrobe.

She begins a series of exercises now, following directions from a book she bought for a few pfennigs. “Most of the exercises aim to strengthen the muscles of the abdomen,” she wrote to her mother last year, scribbling a hasty assurance that she and Arvid will have children “as soon as we can.” The routine — leg lifts and sit-ups and backbends — takes 20 minutes. She’s slender as a dancer, but she’s more earnest than graceful as she flails her arms, kicks her legs. Her nightgown bunches. Her stockinged feet on the wood floor skid and slip.

After exercising, she bathes quickly, using lard soap, and gets dressed.

Though today isn’t significant in the grand stretch of history, to Mildred it’s an important milestone. Today she begins a new teaching job at the Berliner Städtisches Abendgymnasium für Erwachsene — the Berlin Night School for Adults — nicknamed the BAG. There, she’ll come into contact with a fresh crop of German students, and she’s energized by the possibilities. They will be different from the students she taught at the University of Berlin — poorer, predominantly working class, mostly unemployed. Precisely the type of person the Nazi Party has been relentlessly targeting with propaganda.

See her now, striding out the front door with her leather satchel, descending four flights of stairs to the sidewalk. See her walking toward the U-Bahn station, swinging the satchel. In the eyes of her neighbors, she’s an American graduate student, nothing more. •

The rest of the book describes the couple’s resistance work in suspenseful detail, as well as documenting their tragic capture and death.

It’s a journey that, in many respects, began in Wisconsin.

As a geography-loving kid growing up in Scottsdale, Arizona, Binsky always wanted to see the world. Despite a full scholarship offer from the University of Arizona, Binsky — who was born Drew Goldberg; “Binsky” was a nickname given to him by his German-Jewish family — set his sights on UW–Madison. He remembers exactly where he was standing when his mom called to tell him his acceptance had arrived in the mail.

“I still have that letter framed in my room,” he says.

In 2009, he left Arizona for Madison — despite the fact that his forward-thinking father, a Chicago native, insisted they visit the campus in February during a blizzard. “I just loved it,” says Binsky, who was undeterred. “It was just so different and exciting for me.”

At Madison, Binsky scored his first international travel opportunity. He went to Israel through the Jewish Experience of Madison and then spent his junior year abroad in Prague.

“That’s really when everything changed for me,” he says.

He chose Prague for its easy bus or train access to other countries, and that semester, he made it to more than 20. “It was the first time I was introduced to new people, new cultures, new food, new ideas,” says Binsky, who couldn’t get enough. “I was fully hooked. I wanted to create a company, create a travel app, work in travel — I just didn’t really know how yet.”

Binsky, who built a DIY student project into a travel video empire with 5 billion views, poses near the Cairo pyramids in Egypt.

VIDEOS TAKE OFF

Binsky graduated with a double-major in economics and entrepreneurship. In his senior year, he started a travel blog, posting food guides, nightlife guides, and articles like “Top 10 Things to Do in Budapest.” He didn’t exactly have a plan — he just knew he didn’t want to enter corporate America. When one of his travel-abroad friends signed up to teach English for 18 months through the Gyeonggi English Program in Korea, Binsky went down to the offices near College Library to apply — then he was off to South Korea.

“Teaching English was a gateway to basically get paid to travel,” says Binksy, whose round-trip flight, accommodations, food, phone bill, and health insurance were all covered by the program, plus a salary and four weeks of paid vacation. Every weekend he visited another Asian country, gathering fodder for his travel blog, which had begun to attract sponsors and advertisers.

In 2015, on the heels of a three-month solo backpacking trip in India, Binsky met Lee Abbomonte, who at 31 in 2011 had become the youngest man to visit every country in the world. Binsky, then 23 with 40 countries already stamped on his passport, did the math — could he do the same thing in five years?

Binsky began traveling to 20 to 30 countries per year. He tried to stay a week in each place and meet as many locals as he could for experiences that were both authentic and affordable.

“The more I traveled, the more I realized I didn’t know anything about the world,” Binsky says.

In 2016, at a travel convention in Bangkok, he fell in love with a woman named Deanna Sallao, who became his frequent traveling partner. On New Year’s Day in 2017, in Hanoi, Vietnam, she gave him the gift that would change everything: a video camera. “She was like, ‘Hey, you could make videos that last more than 24 hours on Snapchat. Post them on Facebook and YouTube,’ ” recalls Binsky.

A minimalist traveler, he initially balked at carrying more equipment. But he gave it a go, posting his first-ever video on Facebook. Within one day, “What Can $10 Get You in Vietnam?” had 100,000 views, which blew his blogging hits out of the water.

“But the biggest turning point was my seventh video, in April 2017, when I got a camera into North Korea,” he says. “That video reached 10 million views. I pretty much haven’t touched my blog since then.”

Binsky’s destinations have included (in order) France; Oman; Nepal; Guatemala; and Iraq.

PUSHING THROUGH A PANDEMIC

For the next four years, Binsky did everything himself — scripting, filming, editing, uploading, and responding to comments. Now he has a team of 26 freelancers and subcontractors, and his videos have clocked an astonishing 5 billion views. His business went from bringing in around $15,000 to $30,000 a year before the videos to $250,000 per year in 2019 and $500,000 in 2020 — numbers he freely shares because he hopes to provide inspiration for other independent entrepreneurs and aspiring YouTubers. Most of it goes right back into the business — as long as Binsky can keep traveling, he has no need or desire to update his trusty Honda Civic or fly first class (unless he’s got points). “I’m still really frugal,” he says.

Binsky’s casual, personable approach and honesty about the ways in which Americans may be ignorant of other countries’ cultures and customs have made him relatable to a younger audience. His favorite trips are the places his followers say they’re afraid to visit, such as Lebanon and Iran.

“I love being like, well, there’s actually a really cool life here, and let me show you that life,” Binsky says. He particularly loves the Middle East, including Arabian cuisine and hospitality and the principles of Islam. The more people he meets on his travels, the smaller and more humanized the world becomes.

Although the pandemic grounded him in the United States for several months and torpedoed his original goal of visiting all 197 countries by May 2020, he still managed to navigate canceled flights, visa restrictions, and COVID tests before and after every flight. In 2020, he went to Mexico, Egypt, Lebanon, Dubai, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ghana, Tanzania, Ecuador, and Venezuela.

Binsky may have hit his 197th country — and last year married Deanna and bought his first house, back in Arizona — but he’s hardly done traveling. Three months after that triumphant Saudi Arabia trip, he tweeted a photo of himself in Russia on a subzero day, frost encrusting his goatee and fur-lined hat. He continues to build an interactive community with weekly YouTube videos, and he’s getting in on the nonfungible token craze with a collection of “travel tokens” on his website. In 2021, he launched a three-hour, $200 online “travel hacking” master class.

“Now that I’ve finished the countries, I’ll be a little more selective about which countries I want to revisit and which stories I want to tell,” says Binsky. “It’s all about the stories now. I don’t care if I’m in Madison or Greenland or Nicaragua, I just really want to find the most compelling, eye-opening, interesting stories about people and culture.” •

Bryce Richter

On March 31, the UW–Madison community gathered on Library Mall to hold a vigil for peace in Ukraine. The event was presented by the UW Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia and the Associated Students of Madison, which passed a resolution condemning the Russian invasion and calling for a “democratic, peaceful solution.” Amen.

Like all Sibande’s work, Sower in the Field explores the intersection of of race, gender, and labor in South Africa.

In her corner of the Chazen Museum of Art’s Mead Witter Lobby, Mary Sibande’s Sower in the Field is in constant conversation with light. The sculpture — a figure based on a body cast of the artist — wears a cascading dress and cradles an apron of seeds. At eye-level, the contours of the clothing catch the daylight from the wall of windows along East Campus Mall. When viewed from above, shadows spill from her skirt’s hem and ebb and flow with the movement of the sun throughout the day. At night, passersby can admire the work’s quiet, commanding presence backlit against the museum’s lobby.

The bronze piece is a rare departure from Sibande’s usual mixed-media approach but still bears hallmarks of her work, which interrogates intersections of race, gender, and labor in South Africa. The sculpture was cast for the Chazen at a foundry in South Africa and traveled by cargo ship, train, and truck to reach Madison. After its long journey, its message is right at home on the UW campus.

Sower in the Field is the latest acquisition under the Sara Guyer and Scott Straus Contemporary African Art Initiative.

“For a land-grant university, we thought this was a really interesting dialogue: a woman who’s planting something, birth and rebirth, agriculture,” says Katherine Alcauskas, chief curator at the Chazen. “We have a lot of works by John Steuart Curry and other regionalists, and we have a lot of similar images of farmers in fields, so we thought this would be a counterpart [to inspire] students to think about planting, about regionalism, and about the role of crops in the Midwest and in Africa.”

Sower is the latest acquisition under the Sara Guyer and Scott Straus Contemporary African Art Initiative (CAAI), made possible by the Straus Family Foundation. The curatorial endeavor was funded thanks to former UW professors Sara Guyer and Scott Straus to celebrate the diversity of contemporary African art at a campus with a long history in African studies.

“Sara and I found incredible beauty, excitement, energy, and creativity in contemporary African art,” Straus says. “Part of the impetus was wanting to bring it to a larger audience in the United States and to support African artists.”

After an exhibition of CAAI works in fall 2023, the show will likely travel, sending Sower on another, albeit shorter, journey.

The sculpture is in constant conversation with light.

Eagleburger performed heroically during one of the tensest moments of the Gulf War. UW Archives S17568

One day while Lawrence Eagleburger ’52, MS’57 was working on a master’s degree in political science, he spied a poster on a campus bulletin board promoting the Foreign Service Examination.

“I took it, passed it, took the oral exam, and passed that,” said Eagleburger. “Up until then, I had never even thought of the Foreign Service.”

That exam started a widely respected diplomatic career that spanned more than 40 years, culminating with a 42-day stint as secretary of state at the end of President George H. W. Bush’s term and making him the first Foreign Service officer to hold that post.

A quick-witted Milwaukee native, he rose to become the top aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He was known for his skill in managing international crises in Europe and the Balkans, where his seven years of work earned him the nickname “Lawrence of Macedonia.”

Eagleburger was so valued by Kissinger that he was sent to carry out secret diplomacy with the Cubans to test whether relations could be reestablished. He was also dispatched to other hot spots: China after the Tiananmen Square uprising, and Panama after the 1989 U.S. invasion.

He had three sons, all named Lawrence. “It was ego,” Eagleburger said. “And secondly, I wanted to screw up the Social Security system.”

Though Eagleburger was a Republican, his diplomatic skill earned him an appointment by Democratic president Jimmy Carter as ambassador to Yugoslavia. President Ronald Reagan appointed him as assistant secretary for European affairs under Alexander Haig Jr., and he rose to undersecretary for political affairs.

After Eagleburger’s death in 2011, President George H. W. Bush recalled that his performance was “heroic” in the 1991 Gulf War. “During one of the tensest moments of the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein began attacking Israel with Scud missiles … we sent Larry to preserve our coalition,” he said.

Amin’s RAMCOM helps clinicians guide their patients in adhering to their religious obligations without compromising their health. Layal Fathallah

Every year, nearly 2 billion Muslims observe the month of Ramadan, a period marked by prayer, reflection, and ritual fasting. While spiritually immersive and restorative, the practice can become complicated for people who have health conditions or who take medications that are not conducive to prolonged fasting. When Mohamed Amin PhD’13 started his doctoral studies in the UW School of Pharmacy, he encountered a surprising lack of literature regarding how practitioners can support their Muslim patients during periods of fasting. Today, he’s developed RAMCOM, a tool that helps clinicians guide their patients in adhering to their religious obligations without compromising their health.

Many Islamic religious scholars deem a fast broken by taking a pill with a glass of water. Some individuals believe that eye drops, inhalers, and injections can also nullify a fast. This variation in beliefs makes discussing them all the more important. RAMCOM (short for Ramadan Communication) helps facilitate culturally informed conversations about fasting and empowers patients to broach the subject with providers.

“My research is about giving that voice to someone who hasn’t been very visible in the health care system,” Amin says. “We need to make sure we’re building an environment where a patient feels more comfortable saying, ‘Hey, I’m different, and these are my needs.’ ”

RAMCOM now incorporates fasts from several religions, including Judaism and Hinduism. It made its debut in the School of Pharmacy’s Communication Lab led by professor Betty Chewning MS’71, PhD’73 and run by graduate students Arveen Kaur PhDx’22, Bonyan Qudah PhDx’23, and Marwa Rawy MS’19, PhDx’22.

“Understanding these diverse patient needs and improving our own knowledge on cultural competence and health disparities is an important step for improving health outcomes,” Kaur says.

According to Amin, who is now an associate professor at Egypt’s Alamein International University, RAMCOM is just one example of how pharmacists can serve as accessible points of primary care.

“Pharmacists in different countries underestimate the value of the very brief counseling that they give to patients,” he says. “If we make the best use of pharmacies and pharmacists as resources, we can really take public health interventions to a different scale.”

“I feel more foolhardy than brave at this point,” wrote Harriet Bell Merrill 1890, who endured the Byron in order to collect insects, tiny animals, and plants from South American lakes and rivers. “Wherever I land, the threat of cholera, malaria, and the plague are prevalent.”

Despite her private worries, Merrill pulled up her bootstraps — literally — when the ship eventually came ashore. She wore a heavy pair of men’s Oxford boots that drew stares from both locals and fellow travelers, and for the next year, those boots carried Merrill almost 2,000 miles through remote parts of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. She collected hundreds of plant and animal specimens along the way, many of them previously unknown to science, as well as cultural objects for the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Merrill was almost certainly the first professionally trained limnologist to conduct fieldwork in Brazil — and probably everywhere she traveled.

Matthew Berigan ’83, an independent historian now living in Brazil, stumbled upon Merrill’s name while searching for the papers of another UW–trained limnologist, Stillman Wright PhD’28, who conducted the first large-scale survey of northeastern Brazil. It’s likely Merrill’s notes and connections helped to pave the way for Wright’s work, and Berigan hopes that revitalizing the memory of these two scientists will inspire the next generation in both Wisconsin and South America.

“The legacy of inspired curiosity comes from people like Merrill and Wright dedicated to searching out what makes our world tick,” he says.

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Merrill’s brother told her that it was “entirely out of the question for a petite little woman to hazard such a rigorous venture.” Wisconsin Historical Society, WHY-10804

Known to friends as “Hattie Bell,” Merrill was born in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, in 1863. She grew up exploring the Wisconsin River with her brothers and collected insects, rocks, and plants to study under her microscope. Her childhood passion inspired Merrill to become a high school science teacher in Milwaukee, and later to complete a bachelor’s degree at the UW and a master’s at the University of Chicago. After publishing a monograph on Daphnia, a genus of water fleas that filter particles out of lake water, Merrill was invited to become an assistant professor in the burgeoning limnology department at the UW. Founding department chair Edward Birge, later UW–Madison president, became a close mentor and was supportive of Merrill’s long-held dream to conduct fieldwork abroad.

Birge’s encouragement was a crucial counterweight to the many friends and family who tried to dissuade Merrill from traveling. One brother called her plans irresponsible and told her, “It is entirely out of the question for a petite little woman to hazard such a rigorous venture on her own.” Another brother begged her to postpone the trip until it was convenient for him to accompany her as a chaperone.

Merrill ignored them both. “In spite of all the deterrents, I am ready to roll to Rio,” she wrote shortly before her departure.

She proved to be a hardy traveler, even in the roughest of conditions. Fellow expats advised her to “steep herself in whiskey” to fend off yellow fever. During her nights in the field, Merrill was harassed by giant praying mantises, surrounded by caimans, and besieged by fire ants. She trekked for miles on horseback — and by Oxford boot — to reach Iguazú Falls, becoming one of the first Western women to ever behold the monumental waterfalls.

In 1907, Merrill returned to Brazil for another expedition through Venezuela, Trinidad, British Guiana, and Curaçao. “I keep hunting for the ‘unseen’ through the rain forests and waterways,” she wrote to Birge. “One cannot help but witness the coexistence of beauty with despair in the ecological struggle of procreation in this environment.”

After her second trip, Merrill left the UW to pursue a doctorate at the University of Illinois, but during her studies, a genetic heart condition worsened rapidly. Merrill died in 1915 at age 52. Her letters and field notes were preserved by relatives and colleagues, and her grandniece, the late Merrillyn Hartridge, eventually compiled and donated them to the Wisconsin Historical Society.

“Harriet was a persistent, independent woman, afraid of no potential dangers in any country,” wrote Hartridge in her biography of Merrill. “She died with her boots on.”