Contact by email:
Director (or send email to emeriti@emory.edu) Letters to the Editor Click on the above link to let us know what you think (or send email to emeriti@emory.edu)! |
Upcoming Events
November 2
Membership & Development Committee Seminar
November 2 WEBCAST - Membership & Development Committee Seminar
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Contact Other Members
Click here to read about the use of these listservs
find out about a travel destination or find other EUEC members who would like to travel with you, send an email to:
Find other members to get together for shared interests, whether it is forming a book club or a photography club, or getting together to take a hike. Send email to the following link to contact member who would like the same activity!
Courses
If you would like to find other EUEC members interested in taking a MOOC together, an OLLI course together, or possibly teaching together in an OLLI course, click on the following link to send an email:
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This issue of our newsletter is sent to members and friends of the Emory University Emeritus College (EUEC). I hope the newsletter will help keep you informed about our activities and help you feel connected with our members throughout the U.S. On the left are links to our website and links to contact either me or the EUEC office.
With best wishes,
Gray
Gray F. Crouse Director, EUEC
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 Message from the Director
Those of you who have been coming to our Lunch Colloquiums or have watched them on our webcasts know how fortunate we are to have such a great set of speakers. Thanks to our members who write about the Colloquiums, you can find out something about them without even viewing them. We have gotten a new microphone which greatly improves the audio quality of our webcasts; I hope those of you participating in the webcasts will appreciate the better sound quality. There are many events in the next two weeks. Of special note in addition to the events at the Luce Center (a program this Wednesday and a Lunch Colloquium next Monday), there is a Beckett celebration on November 5 and a talk by Steve Nowicki on November 10. Nominations for our next round of EUEC Awards of Distinction are due November 11. There is information about making a nomination below. We have no shortage of distinguished members. However, it can be difficult for us to find out everything that you are doing. Please help us by making a nomination or letting us know about your own activities.
I am very grateful to John Bugge, Herb Benario, and Gretchen Schulz for help with proofing and editing.
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Lunch Colloquium November 7
  The Making of the Pre-modern World: Archaeological Research Digs up Old Artifacts and New Ideas
The Luce Center Room 130 11:30-1:00 Aaron Jonas Stutz
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Oxford College
Liv Nilsson Stutz
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, Emory College
Click here to read below about this Lunch Colloquium
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Lunch Colloquium October 17
 The Strange Life and Death of the Good White Southerners
Joseph CrespinoJimmy Carter Professor and Chair Department of History
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Lunch Colloquium October 24
 Mary Hutchinson Observed: From Bloomsbury to Beckett
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November 2 Program
 Tracking, Spying, and Customizing: Political Communication in the New Media Age. Wednesday, November 2, 2016 2:00 - 4:00 p.m. Room 130 - The Luce Center Amelia Arsenault
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EUEC Awards of Distinction
The following is from our Honors and Awards Committee: Dear Emeritus College Colleagues, The Honors and Awards Committee needs your assistance with its next annual activity, that is, the selection of up to four recipients of the EUEC Faculty Award of Distinction and one recipient of the Distinguished Service Award. Nominations are needed for both awards before the committee can make any selections. I am asking you review the criteria and then to think about colleagues who you believe meet the criteria for selection. You might also think about whether you meet the criteria yourself. We do accept self nominations as well as nominations by others. Because faculty rarely report their activities and accomplishments once they have retired it is hard to know just how much some of you have done in recent years. Once you have identified a nominee it will take a little of your time to write your nomination letter, but it will be time well spent. While these awards carry no monetary value the recognition from one's peers is priceless and greatly valued by the recipients of the Faculty Award of Distinction and the Distinguished Service Award. Please help the Honors and Awards Committee with this important task. You don't even have to come to a meeting to participate in the process. Thank you, Helen S. O'Shea, Professor Emerita Chair, EUEC Honors and Awards Committee. The criteria for the awards can be seen by clicking here. Nominations are due by November 11. With a membership as dispersed as ours is, it can be difficult to identify some of those who are very deserving of an award. If you know of someone, but don't feel you have enough information to make a nomination, please send us what information you can.
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Events
There is a lot happening on campus this month, and much of it involves our members. November 5
On Saturday, November 5, at 7:30 in Glenn Auditorium, a celebration of the publication of the Beckett Letters called "Words fail so simply love" will feature, among others, our own Brenda Bynum and Don Saliers. Click here to see the flyer for the celebration.
Click here to see information about all of the Beckett events.
Below are shown some of our members helping with proofing of the Beckett letters:
Two Events on November 10!
In 2015, EUEC Member Steve Nowicki received a grant from the Templeton Foundation to study the determinants of locus of control, and his most recent book, Choice or Chance, is based on this research. In it, he explores the implications of a person's perception of what happens to people (i.e., whether they feel they are in control (Internal Locus) or fate is in control (External Locus)), and how these perceptions can have a profound effect on how peoples' lives have turn out. This is a chance to hear Steve talk about his book and also get some free food! The flyer for the event can be seen by clicking here. Note: this talk is in GBS_W525, which is in the new wing of the Goizueta Business School on the fifth floor.
Also on November 10
On Thursday, November 10, will occur the first major public event celebrating the arrival of the Shakespeare first folio. The invitation to EUEC states: I'm writing to invite you and the Emeritus College to attend our first major public event in honor of our yearlong celebration of Shakespeare at Emory. We are proud to host a special program in honor of the arrival of an original first folio on loan from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the opening of the free exhibition, "First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare" on view at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, open from November 5-December 11, 2016. Will of the People will feature dramatic monologues by Theater Emory students and faculty, a musical performance of Duke Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder led by Dwight Andrews, and a panel discussion by internationally acclaimed scholars Dr. Ayanna Thompson, Dr. Nicholas Grene, and Tom Magill. These scholars will explore Shakespeare's place in the African-American arts tradition and in modern Ireland. Prior to this event there will be a pre-party with festivities for all, free food for the first 100 guests, and an opportunity to view the first folio at the Carlos Museum. We're hoping to have a large turnout from students young and old, faculty, and staff. As such, we would be much obliged if you would forward this to the Emeritus College. We hope to see you there!
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Search for a New Provost
A Search Committee has been formed to present candidates for a new Provost to President Sterk. The news article about this committee can be read by clicking here. The Provost is one of the most important positions in the University, and so the members of this Committee have a great responsibility. Of particular interest to us is that three of our recent Lunch Colloquium speakers are on this Committee! The Committee is co-chaired by Carol Anderson, and the members include Andra Gillespie and David Lynn. This is just one more indication that our Mind Matters Committee is bringing us the "movers and shakers" of our faculty.
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A summary of the September 20 meeting of the Faculty Council can be read by clicking here. One of the items was a motion to endorse further exploration of the feasibility of forming an Emory Faculty Club presented by EUEC Members John Bugge and Mike Kutner. A summary of the September 27 meeting of the University Senate can be read by clicking here.
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We note the passing of Eugene Lee and Myron Kaufman. |
I believe my letter to President Obama concerning unnecessary surgery would be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Thank you, Stewart R. Roberts, Jr., MD
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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November 2 Program
Tracking, Spying, and Customizing:
Political Communication in the New Media Age Amelia Arsenault, Assistant Professor of Communication at Georgia State University The meteoric expansion of the internet and smart phones has upended traditional methods of political communication. New hybrid political media organizations are experimenting with filtering, tracking, and customization techniques that capitalize on all the data your smartphone and personal computers provide. This takes place through activities like producing and distributing fake content, tracking your internet browsing behavior, and creating astroturf organizations designed to look like grassroots political movements. Professor Arsenault's presentation will explore the role of social media in contemporary American politics, the evolution of digital propaganda tools, and the implications of these trends for the future of politics and society. About Amelia Arsenault
Dr. Arsenault's academic research focuses on new media, public diplomacy, and international communication. She is currently working on a book project that explores the nascent industry of digital "information warriors" who provide contract services to political actors seeking to influence the online media agenda. She teaches courses in new media, network theory, and communication and power and has published in various edited volumes and journals, including Information, Communication, and Society, International Sociology and the International Journal of Communication. She also serves as the co-Managing Editor of the open access, peer-reviewed journal Media Industries.
She was previously a non-resident fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School for Communication (2012 - 2014), a resident fellow at the Center for Media, Data, and Society and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Central European University (Fall 2014), and the Media and Democracy Research Fellow at the Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania (2009-2016). She holds a PhD from the University of California Annenberg School for Communication, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a BA from Dartmouth College. Click here to return to top
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Lunch Colloquium November 7
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Liv Nilsson Stutz and Aaron Stutz in the field, on the terrace of Mughr el-Hamamah.
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The Making of the Pre-modern World: Archaeological Research Digs up Old Artifacts and New Ideas
Liv Nilsson Stutz
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, Emory College
Aaron Jonas Stutz
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Oxford College
Since 2008, Drs. Stutz and Nilsson Stutz have led survey, excavation, and analysis of the archaeological layers preserved at the Mughr el-Hamamah site in the Jordan Valley, the corridor linking our African evolutionary ancestral home with the rest of the world. Clues from this cave system document how hunter-gatherers repeatedly camped there 40,000-plus years ago. The discoveries give us some new ideas about why humans have such a propensity to transform both their own societies and the environments around them. About Liv and Aaron
Liv Nilsson Stutz received graduate degrees in Ethnology and Biological Anthropology from the University of Bordeaux I, France, and she earned her PhD in Archaeology from Lund University, Sweden, in 2004. She is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology on the Atlanta Campus, having taught at both the Oxford and Emory campuses since 2008. Her main research interest is in understanding death, dying, and what it means for our bodily and social experience--from archaeological as well as contemporary cultural perspectives. Liv has published 60 scholarly articles and book chapters, mainly on the archaeology of death and burial and the politics of cultural heritage and identity. She is recently the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial from Oxford University Press 2013.
Aaron Stutz earned his MA in Anthropology in 1999 and his PhD in 2002, both from the University of Michigan. He is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Oxford College, having taught at Oxford since Fall 2007. His research interest is in the complex ways that biology and culture interact to shape human diversity, experience, and our impact on the planet. His archaeological research on the Stone Age of the Near East has appeared in the Journal of Human Evolution and the Journal of Archaeological Science. Together, Liv and Aaron began excavations at the Mughr el-Hamamah (pronounced Moo-gher el-Hah-mahm) site in Jordan in 2010. It is part of an effort to use their complementary expertise to study how biology, technology, society and social practices, and even worldview may have evolved and changed, from the time that Neandertals went extinct and anatomically modern human populations grew and spread around 50,000 years ago ... to the origins of agriculture and village life around 10,000 years ago. In this presentation, they'll be discussing some new results from their research team, the result of painstaking collaborative study of the materials they excavated and documented in 2010. You can read an article about their work and see a narrated slide show on the Emory eScienceCommons website by clicking here. Click here to return to top
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Lunch Colloquium October 17
The Strange Life and Death of the Good White Southerners
Joseph Crespino
Jimmy Carter Professor and Chair
Department of History Joe Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University, began his spell-binding Lunch Colloquium with an explanation of his mysterious title. It contained an anachronism, he said. "White Southerners"? Of course Southerners were white because before the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, there were no black Southerners, none at least that whites recognized. And who gets to decide who is "good"? Good white Southerners were designated by national elites as those most likely to usher the South out of its backwardness and into the national mainstream. For his current book project, Joe is focusing on the "good white Southerners" of the period that stretched from 1933 to 1994. It began with Franklin D. Roosevelt (who visited Georgia 42 times) describing the South as the nation's "#1 economic problem," continued with Truman, Johnson, Clinton, and Carter (all of whom were Southerners themselves), and ended with Newt Gingrich and the conservative GOP takeover of the House of Representatives and southern state legislatures. Who were these good white Southerners? They were both men and women (Joe introduced us to the remarkable but little known Dorothy Tilly), Democrats and Republicans, and elected officials as well as academics, writers, and newspaper editors. Indeed, they were so diverse that it was making it difficult to tell their story, Joe said. That might explain why he chose to concentrate on Atticus Finch, the hero of Harper Lee's timeless To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that nearly everyone in the packed room had read. Mockingbird was a primer for students of racial injustice in the South in the 1930s, and Finch a model of man who for justice's sake risked everything to defend an innocent black man accused of rape. But writing the political biography of a fictional character is not without its problems. That difficulty was compounded with the publication in 2015 of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, a sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel but written first. Most of us cringed when we read Watchman's portrait of the racist Atticus of the 1950s, a heartbreaking fall from grace. But Joe asked us to read Watchman differently. Setting Lee's second novel in historical context, he explained that she was not focusing on Atticus's racism (which when she wrote in the 1950s would not have been particularly noteworthy) but trying instead to do something quite different. In Watchman, she sought to portray Atticus as the decent white man in the middle, a segregationist certainly, but one who, like those other respectable men who joined the White Citizens' Councils, was attempting to find respectable ways to defeat the Brown v. Board of Education decision and move the South forward. No one could have foreseen the way progressive change actually came to the South. Instead of good white Southerners leading the way, black Southerners confronted both rude Ku Kluxers and genteel Citizens' Council members to force the South to break with its past.
The audience eagerly asked questions until Gretchen Schulz reluctantly had to end the session. By then it was clear that Joe's book-in-progress is certainly going to continue his outstanding work at the intersection of region, race, and religion in the American South. --Jim Roark Click here to see the webcast of this talk.
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Lunch Colloquium October 24
Mary Hutchinson Observed: From Bloomsbury to Beckett
Brenda Bynum Senior Lecturer Emerita Department of Theater Studies Our own Brenda Bynum spoke at the Lunch Colloquium on Monday, October 24, which was extremely well attended and a "delicious" treat. Indeed, over half of the audience renewed acquaintances with her even before the talk began, which was entitled: "Mary Hutchinson Observed: From Bloomsbury to Beckett." Brenda the actor, playwright, director, teacher, and scholar is obviously no stranger to this emeritus group. The inspiration for this talk was initiated by Brenda's work on the correspondence of Samuel Beckett,the editing of which has been a project sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. As so often happens in research, one encounters serendipitously something that attracts one's eye that was unexpected and little known to the researcher. In this case it was Brenda learning about the relationship spanning over 20 years that Beckett had with a Mary Hutchinson. Brenda immediately sensed a kinship to this woman and wanted to know more. She applied for and won a Heilbrun Fellowship in 2004 and used the stipend to travel to the University of Texas at Austin and its Harry Ransom Center, where Ms. Hutchinson's papers were collected, and immersed herself in learning more. Mary Hutchison was born in India as Mary Barnes in 1889 and died in 1977 at the age of 89. She was born into a prominent British family (Sir Hugh Barnes and Winifred Strachey Barnes) and spent some of her childhood in India, and later after the death of her mother at age 25, in Florence, Italy, where she lived with her grandparents, who loved and spoiled her and her brother, James. It was in these environments that she cultivated her love of aesthetics especially in literature and art. Her privileged and cultured position in society as well as her beauty and personality allowed her to meet with other prominent individuals of the time including influential artists. She married St. John (Jack) Hutchinson, a prominent London barrister, in 1910 and remained with him until his death in 1942 despite her extramarital relationships with Clive Bell, Aldous and Maria Huxley, Vita Sackville-West, Peter Morris and others. The Bloomsbury group, consisting of English writers, artists, philosophers and intellectuals, was prominent during the time of Mary's life. Her acquaintances with members of the group including Lytton Strachey (her cousin) and Virginia Woolf and others, coupled with her being a beautiful, fashion-conscious, wealthy socialite who could host wonderful parties allowed her access to this social group and its many famous people. Although Ms. Hutchinson was not a truly gifted artist herself, she was someone who was completely dedicated to artistic effort and had a gift of "immediate insight into the quality of good art." Mary had two children, Barbara who married Victor Rothschild and Jeremy who married Peggy Ashcroft. After Jack died her financial status was re-established most generously by Victor. This allowed her to continue her promotion of the arts. She came upon Samuel Beckett in 1955 and was quickly attracted to him and his creative genius, and promoted him until her death. Ms. Bynum has the extraordinary capacity to research the lives of prominent women, like Flannery O'Connor, and less prominent women, like Helen Lewis and Carrie Goodwin, and to use this research to resurrect them with their words and voice inflections. She did it again today by drawing our attention to the life of Mary Hutchinson and spotlighting the importance of supporters of the arts, such as we can all aspire to be. --Jim Keller
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In Memoriam
EUEC Member Eugene Lee died on October 2, 2016. He was a professor at Emory from 1963-1993 and retired as Professor Emeritus of Education. His complete obituary may be read by clicking here.
EUEC Member Myron Kaufman died on October 23, 2016. Myron was a Professor of Chemistry at Emory University for over 42 years, after earning his B.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, and then serving as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University. His complete obituary may be read by clicking here. |
Walking the campus with Dianne
It appears I may have finally stumped some of you: my photo in the last issue was located in a place not everyone has access to -- the Briarcliff Campus. The photo of the portico in our last newsletter is a small portion of the decaying Candler Mansion located at Briarcliff. The mansion was once home to Coca-Cola heir Asa Candler, Jr. If you are interested, here's a link that provides information on the history of the building and grounds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briarcliff_(mansion)
The Briarcliff campus also includes the old Georgia Mental Health Institute, which is now mostly empty but has recently been used for one of the many Georgia filming locations -- If you have access to Netflix, one of their original shows called "Stranger Things" had portions filmed there.
I've included a few additional photos of the mansion, but that's all you'll get for now ... Other parts of the Briarcliff Campus may be the subject of a future photo walk!
Top left- Portico connecting a sun/activity room to the home
Top right - Detail of light fixture on the front entrance of the house
Bottom left - fountain with greenhouse at rear of house
Bottom right - front view of the house
 
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Emory University Emeritus College The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206 Atlanta, GA 30329 |
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