🍎 Back to School | Badge of the Month | September 2022

Michael_Cooksey It sure was--and he was involved in so many places on campus, including history, the arts, culture--a true polymath with an amazing sense of humor and mischief.

I've got to mention Alexander Valentinovich Riasanovsky, who taught three of the four members of my family Russian history at Penn. (I knew him at a very different time in Russian-American relations, needless to say.) He was an historian, painter, poet, gourmand, and dog lover who was an institution at the university and is probably the reason why I carry a love for history, culture, and creativity with me to this day. He was a larger-than-life figure who was born in Manchuria, China where his family had fled during the Russian Civil War, and emigrated to the U.S. where he played football in high school and eventually became a Rhodes scholar and got his doctorate, teaching in the history department for more than thirty years. Here is is obituary: Alexander Riasanovsky, History | University of Pennsylvania Almanac (upenn.edu)