Eric Sundquist, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences 1974
As a teacher and author, Sundquist has highlighted the voices of racial and ethnic minorities in American literature and has been a driving force behind the study of multicultural literature. Currently the UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, Sundquist has written or edited nine books and has won a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a rare honor for a literary scholar.
In 1993, his book, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association as the best book published that year. His most recent work, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, won the Weinberg Judaic Studies Institute Book Award. He received the prestigious Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2006; the $1.5 million award over three years helps fund his ongoing research and teaching related to the Holocaust’s role in American and modern culture. He is currently writing a book for Yale University Press titled King’s Dream, a study of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Sundquist came to KU from McPherson, and he credits his study of music in high school and at KU with introducing him to diverse cultures. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees from Johns Hopkins University. There he began teaching English and humanities courses before moving on to the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a full professor in six years. He later held a named professorship at Vanderbilt University and taught at Northwestern University as a professor of English and African-American Studies before joining the UCLA faculty.
Roger Youmans, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences 1955, School of Medicine 1958 and 1965
Like Sundquist, Youmans through his career has sought to heal racial differences and other inequities. During his undergraduate years at KU, Youmans did his part for integration years before the Civil Rights movement gained momentum. As a Summerfield Scholar and varsity tennis player, he joined the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity—the first intercollegiate greek fraternity for African-Americans. When news of his membership in Alpha Phi Alpha spread, a burning cross appeared on the lawn of the fraternity. Later, as a first-year medical student, he traveled across the South with his fraternity brothers and experienced racism and discrimination firsthand.
In 1961, he took a leave of absence from his KU surgical residency and traveled to Africa, where he worked as the medical director of the Sona Bata Hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo shortly after the nation gained its independence. After receiving a diploma in tropical medicine from the Princess Astrid School of Tropical Medicine in Belgium, he returned to Congo, working 10 years in bush hospitals. He braved desperate conditions to deliver surgical care, improve the medical infrastructure and establish surgical training programs for Congolese physicians. He also worked in Ghana and Nigeria as a visiting professor of surgery and as a medical missionary in South American nations.
In the United States, Youmans was a surgeon at California hospitals before he returned to the Midwest. He taught surgery at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine and the Oral Roberts University School of Medicine, where he received awards for outstanding teaching each year from 1983 to 1987.
His experiences led him to write numerous articles and books, including When Bull Elephants Fight: An American Surgeon’s Chronicle of Congo in 2006.
Youmans currently serves on the board of the United Front Against Riverblindness—a disease prevalent in Africa’s tropical areas—and the boards of Health Teams International and Blessings International, both based in Tulsa.
As a teacher and author, Sundquist has highlighted the voices of racial and ethnic minorities in American literature and has been a driving force behind the study of multicultural literature. Currently the UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, Sundquist has written or edited nine books and has won a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a rare honor for a literary scholar.
Like Sundquist, Youmans through his career has sought to heal racial differences and other inequities. During his undergraduate years at KU, Youmans did his part for integration years before the Civil Rights movement gained momentum. As a Summerfield Scholar and varsity tennis player, he joined the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity—the first intercollegiate greek fraternity for African-Americans. When news of his membership in Alpha Phi Alpha spread, a burning cross appeared on the lawn of the fraternity. Later, as a first-year medical student, he traveled across the South with his fraternity brothers and experienced racism and discrimination firsthand.