Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney will
deliver this year’s main Commencement address and headlines
a group of four honorary degree recipients that also includes physician
and scientist Anthony Fauci, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David
Levering Lewis and Methodist composer (and Emory faculty member)
Carlton “Sam” Young, President Bill Chace announced
last week.
“I am delighted,” Chace said, “that the 2003 Commencement
ceremonies will honor these four extraordinary individuals.”
Each honorary degree recipient will speak during Commencement, but
Heaney’s keynote address will be slightly longer than the
others’, Chace said. He added that he hoped faculty and students
might incorporate lessons from the honorees’ work into their
studies during the remainder of spring semester.
Heaney, born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, returns
to Emory 15 years after delivering the inaugural Richard Ellman
Lectures in 1988. He published his first book of poetry, Death
of a Naturalist, in 1966, and in 1995 he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature, joining William Butler Yeats as the only
Irish poets to be so honored.
Heaney’s Opened Ground, a collection of poems from 1966–96,
was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in
1999, and his most recent translation, Beowulf (2000), won the Whitbread
Book of the Year Award.
A pioneer in the field of immunoregulation, Fauci has served since
1984 as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Disease at the National Institutes of Health. He recently was awarded
the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine, the largest medical
prize in the United States and the largest in the world after the
Nobel.
Fauci’s work has focused on the regulation of human immune
responses with applications for such diseases as AIDS and Wegener’s
granulomatosis. Currently he plays a key role in formulating government
policy to combat bioterrorism.
Currently the Martin Luther King Jr. University Professor of History
at Rutgers University, Lewis is author of a two-volume biography
of W.E.B. DuBois, published in 1994 and 2001, winning the Pulitzer
Prize both times. An Atlanta native, he attended the same high school
as Martin Luther King and has taught at numerous universities around
the world.
Studying African American culture through the contributions of elite
blacks to social change and artistic achievement, Lewis delivered
the keynote address at Emory’s international conference on
lynching last fall that was inspired by the “Without Sanctuary”
exhibit.
Called the “meadowlark” of Methodism, Young is an internationally
known composer for the United Methodist Church and the global Christian
community. Young’s 150 published works are in major music
catalogs, and he is the only person to have edited two major hymnals
for the same denomination in the 20th century.
A professor emeritus in the Candler School of Theology, Young once
directed the school’s music program, and he composed and conducted
a piece for the 20th anniversary of Cannon Chapel in 2001.
An exhibit in Woodruff Library near the main entrance chronicles
the lives and achievements of the four honorees, and information
about each person available at
www.emory.edu/COMMENCEMENT.
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