1981

I'm really starting to love this job! Despite the upcoming deadline staring me in the face, I'm enjoying the excuse to contact old friends and meet classmates for the first time. I've been amazed that identifying myself as "your class co-secretary" often merits a quick e-mail response from folks I've never met. Mutual Dartmouth connections recently prompted me to reconnect with Mary Favret, whom I first met freshman fall when we both rowed and lived in the River Cluster. Mary has been professor of English at Indiana University since 1988. While Mary teaches 18th- and 19th-century British literature, her husband, Andrew Miller, also at IU, focuses on Victorian literature. They have two children, Cassandra (9) and Ben (7), and enjoy "a good life" in a college town where they can walk to work, to the park, the pool, etc. Mary says it's great working in the same department as her husband, but she notes that members of their local book group were a bit nervous about including two English professors at first! Mary's next book, War at a Distance, which explores Britain's involvement in the Napoleonic Wars, is expected to be published sometime in 2008. Mary regrets not being able to make it to the 25th reunion because it conflicted with a family vacation, but was happy that it provided the impetus to get together with both Cindy Greco Herr in California and Polly Duncan Collum in Kentucky this past year. Mary and I not only caught up on each other's lives, but she clued me in to two other female classmates who are also living the English scholarly life at major universities.

Amanda Anderson is the Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and department chair at Johns Hopkins University, where she's taught since 1999. She specializes in Victorian literature and contemporary literary, cultural and political theory. Amanda's latest book is The WayWe Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, 2006). Amanda answered my e-mail almost immediately, filling me in on a few personal details: She's married to classmate Allen Hance, a senior policy analyst at the Northeast- Midwest Institute in Washington, D.C., where he is currently working on U.S. farm and food policy. They have two "wonderful children," Jackson (12) and Emily (6). "We adopted Emily from Vietnam in 2001, which was a great experience," notes Amanda.

Mary Fuller is associate professor of English at MIT, where she's been since 1989, specializing in Renaissance and medieval literature and the literature of travel and exploration. Her publications include Voyages in Print: English Travel to America:1576-1624. More generally she is interested in genre: what gets called literature, what gets called history and what the consequences are of making the distinction.

Charlie Huizenga is neither female nor an English professor, but he is a research specialist at the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) and lecturer in the department of architecture at UC Berkeley. While Charlie leads CBE's building quality benchmarking and occupant feedback projects, it was news of his involvement in a nonprofit called Agua Para La Vida that caused me to e-mail him just before deadline. Since 1987, when Charlie founded the group with his graduate school advisor, Agua Para La Vida has been helping rural Nicaraguan communities build their own drinking water and sanitation systems. As of this year they have helped bring clean water to more than 14,000 people. Charlie sent me a link from The PalisadianPost (www.palisadespost.com/content/index.cfm?story_id=1894) that gives an overview of the great work they do. Check it out.

Well, that's my word limit and deadline. Please keep the e-mails coming!

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