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Upcoming Events
Monday
May 7, 2018
Lunch Colloquium
Thomas Thangaraj
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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
One of the highlights of our year took place last week, with the annual Sheth Distinguished Lecture. The lecture, made possible by the generosity of Jag and Madhu Sheth, is to address the topic of "Creativity in Later Life." EUEC Member Dana Greene, our speaker for this year, fulfilled that expectation beautifully. Dana has been amazingly productive in retirement, and I gained a new realization of and appreciation for the creativity involved in writing biographies. She is also one of our "distant" members, staying in contact with us and even benefitting from a Bianchi award to help with the publication of her latest book. Thanks to Angelika Pohl, you can read about her lecture below and can watch the video of her lecture that will soon be on our website.
Next week we will also benefit from the temporary return to Atlanta of another of our distant members. Thomas Thangaraj, now living in India, will talk about "Contemporary Challenges to Christianity in India." It is great to have colleagues who stay in touch with us, even when they move away, and great to be able to welcome them home, at least for a while!
One of the services we provide to faculty who are not yet retired is a series of Retirement Seminars, on topics designed to aid in the transition to retirement. This semester, we have offered two seminars, each repeated on a different day and month. Last week, we offered the second of the seminars on "The Emeritus College: Who we are and what we can do for you." Much thanks to John Bugge, Jim Keller, Mike Kutner, Helen O'Shea, and Gretchen Schulz for participating in this seminar. They were very persuasive in describing the joys of the Emeritus College: six not-yet-retired faculty who attended have joined as members! They, along with others, are listed below. Please be sure to welcome them whenever you get a chance. The other seminar we have offered is "Can you afford to retire?" by Peter Sebel. Peter is offering that again on May 9; as you might imagine that topic is extremely popular!
I am very grateful to John Bugge, Herb Benario, and Gretchen Schulz for help with proofing and editing.
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Sheth Distinguished Lecture--April 23
Field Notes of a Biographer
Dana Greene, PhD, Dean Emerita, Oxford College
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New Members
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium--May 7
Contemporary Challenges to Christianity in India
Thomas Thangaraj, D. W. and Ruth Brooks Professor Emeritus of World Christianity, Candler School of Theology Dr. Thangaraj tells us that he plans to address four questions with regard to Christianity in India, the country of his birth and upbringing (as a Christian) where he has returned to reside much of each year since his retirement from Emory in 2008. 1) Is Christianity in India purely a product of Western colonial enterprise? 2) Is Indian Christianity predominantly governed by "membership drive" or "religious conversion efforts" as Hindu nationalists in India would like to portray? 3) How do we understand the various incidents of Hindu-Christian conflicts in various parts of India? 4) As an Indian Christian theologian how do I envision possibilities for the future? About Thomas Thangaraj Thomas Thangaraj received a BSc from St. John's College in 1961, an MSc from Madras Christian College in 1964, a BD from Serampore College in 1968, an MTh from United Theological College in 1976, and a ThD from Harvard Divinity School in 1983. He is the D. W. & Ruth Brooks Professor Emeritus of World Christianity at Emory's Candler School of Theology. Before joining Emory, he served as minister in the Church of South India in the Tirunelveli area and taught at the Tamilnadu Theological Seminary in Madurai, India. He has given guest lectures in Burma, Denmark, Germany, India, Japan, Norway, the Philippines, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and he has been actively involved in programs of inter-religious dialogue at both the national and international levels. He also was a member of "Thinking Together," a think-tank sponsored by the Office of Inter-Religious Relations at the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland, bringing theologians of various faiths together to examine world religions. Dr. Thangaraj has published various articles in Tamil, English and U.S. periodicals and has written Christian hymns in Tamil for use in churches in India. His current research focuses on Indian Christian theological responses to religious pluralism and on constructing a systematic theology from a global perspective. He retired from Emory in 2008 and moved back to India, where he now resides. An Emory Report profile about Thomas in 2004 may be read by clicking here. Click here to return to top
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Sheth Distinguished Lecture--April 23
Field Notes of a Biographer
Dana Greene, PhD, Dean Emerita, Oxford CollegeAt the 2018 Sheth Distinguished Lecture, scheduled for April 23rd at the Miller-Ward Alumni House, EUEC Member Dana Greene, Emory PhD 1971 and Dean Emerita of Emory's Oxford College, presented her audience of more than a hundred attentive listeners with rich, insightful, and memorable "Field Notes of a Biographer." As the author of biographies of - as she called them - four "very different and very dead 20th-century English literary women," Evelyn Underhill, Maisie Ward, Denise Levertov, and Elizabeth Jennings, Dr. Greene had plenty of experience to draw on for her "ruminations."
Dr. Greene was movingly introduced by her former colleague and good friend Dr. Patti Owen-Smith, Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at Oxford College. Dr. Owen-Smith felt compelled to speak not only of Dr. Greene's scholarly eminence, but also of her stellar qualities as a human being. She said, "although Dana's portfolio is deep, thick, and impressive (so much so that, due to time, I can only mention a very few of these accomplishments), [they] pale in comparison with all of the personal qualities she possesses as a human being - empathy, compassion, care, and the extraordinary capacity to be a good friend." A look at the "brief" summary of Dr. Greene's accomplishments, as they are listed in the EUEC Newsletter of April 16, shows an almost mind-boggling array of professional achievements and involvements. Instead of repeating the list again here, I encourage the reader to refer to the earlier newsletter or to visit Dana Greene's lovely website danagreene.org.
Dr. Greene began her talk by praising the EUEC as "one of the few unsiloed places in the university," a unique place where members can converse and even nurture new friendships with people shaped by disciplines different from their own. These cross-disciplinary encounters provide intellectual enrichment and can, she claims, "provoke us, and wake us up." She reminded us that the EUEC is meant to serve retired academics, and so, she explained, she had pondered the various meanings of "retired" and decided she preferred to call retirement "venerable re-engagement," though she best likes the Spanish term for retirees, "jubilados," i.e., rejoicers!
Dr. Greene said she has very purposely chosen to write biographies about notable women because accomplished women are too often ignored and die in obscurity. She shared how, in trying to understand her subjects, she "lived intimately with each of them," and then "mourned when each [was]gone, dead on the page." They live on in her imagination, and she feels them "imperiously reckoning" with her, who persisted in trying to understand them.
Dr. Greene briefly reviewed for us the long and hallowed history of the genre of biography starting with the Greeks and leading right up to modern times, when Lytton Strachey's Lives of Eminent Victorians first departed from the tradition of adulation and used critique and exposé to knock four revered Victorians off their pedestals. Dr. Greene, in contrast, conceives of her subjects as complex beings, rather like carpets, with two sides, the public upper side and the private side underneath, both intricately woven together into an integral whole. Pick out just a few strands, and it falls apart.
Biographers in our day have a mixed reputation; Dr. Greene reports that they have been denounced as burglars, transgressors, predators, grave robbers, flesh-eating bacteria, busybodies, Judases, rapists. Yet -- or maybe because of this -- biography is the most popular nonfiction genre and yields some of the biggest sales. It is a burgeoning field, as indicated by notable publications in 2017 alone of biographies of Grant, Muhammad Ali, Nixon, the poet Milosz, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Golda Meir, Elizabeth Bishop, Pauli Murray, Lenin, and Gorbachev.
Of course, much controversy exists in the field of literary biography, with one view holding that art and life are separate and that art should not be reduced to a result of an artist's life. Dr. Greene holds that not only can one illuminate the other, but that it is important to understand the artist as living and working -- and being variously received by the public -- in a specific cultural and political context. There is also the idea that the dead artist "calls out" to the writer to be remembered, that the biographer is the handmaid of the dead author, helping her live again, but guided by an "oath" to interpret but not make up the facts. Nor is a given biography ever the final say on a life. Dr. Greene says, "Let a hundred biographies bloom!."
So what is it like, the writing of a biography? It is hard and tedious work, she told us, combing through dozens of dusty boxes of archival materials, reading all 24,000 of Levertov's poems, dealing with uncooperative informants, tracing the subjects' physical journey through their small or expansive worlds. But "facts do not make a story." The real challenge is to sort out what is essential, to decide what details reveal the core of a life and how to point at "this mysterious center of each person's being."
Another challenge for the writer is to win the reader's trust. As a way of illustrating the critical importance of engaging the reader's interest and trust at the beginning, Dr. Greene asked her former colleague Gretchen Schulz to read aloud the first few paragraphs of her Elizabeth Jennings biography. Indeed, it worked: the beautiful, evocative narration drew the audience into the story, and left us all wanting to learn more about Jennings.
Finally, Dr. Greene talked about the difficulty of ending a biography. After living with the subject day in and day out for years, after "tending her through illness and failure, through positive and rocky relations," she is faced with "getting her dead." When she finally "[gets] her dead on the page," Dr. Greene feels deep loss, as if something inside her has died. To bring to life, as it were, the death of Levertov, Dr. Greene asked another of her Oxford colleagues, Clark Lemons, to read aloud her description of the peculiar and individualistic way in which Levertov approached her death.
So why write biographies, or why read them? "A biography illuminates how beauty is born, often against great odds. It invites us into that process; we see how it happens." A well-constructed biography also leads us to reflect on how we are constructing our own lives, how we are composing our own biography.
Dr. Greene received enthusiastic and prolonged applause for her lecture and again after she had graciously responded to many questions and comments from the audience.
We would note that those who were not able to attend the occasion may wish to access the tape of the lecture that will soon be available on the Emeritus College website (as are tapes of most of the other Sheth Distinguished Lectures that the generosity of Dr. Jagdish and Mrs. Madhu Sheth has enabled us to offer each year since 2004).
-- Angelika Pohl
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Dana Greene flanked by Madhu and Jag Sheth
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New Members
New members are the lifeblood of any organization. Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC!
Robert M. Cohen, PhD, MD, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, retired
George E. Wright, MD, Associate Professor Emeritus of Orthopaedics
In Transition
David R. Blumenthal, PhD, Jay and Leslie Cohen Professor of Judaic Studies
Patricia Bridges, PT, MMSc, EdD, Associate Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine and Director of Clinical Education in Rehabilitation Medicine Micheal W. Giles, PhD, Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Political Science
Xi Erick (Eric) Lin, PhD, Professor and Research Director, Department of Otolaryngology
Jan R. Mead, PhD, Professor of Pediatrics
Neil Sidell, PhD, Professor of Gynecology and Obstetrics
James C Ritchie, PhD, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
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Faculty Activities
Ron Gould Goodrich C. White Professor Emeritus of Mathematics |
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Discrete Math. 341, 203-212, Fig. 2
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Being laid up with a hip replacement has certain benefits. Ron reports that he has had a lot of time to do the following: I will have two PhD students graduate in May: Ariel Keller and Warren Shull. The following papers have appeared or been accepted: On vertex disjoint cycles and degree sum conditions, with K. Hirohata and A. Keller. Discrete Math. 341(2018), no. 1, 203-212. On a conjecture on spanning trees with few branch vertices, with W. Shull, Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing, to appear. Gaps in the saturation spectrum of trees, with P. Horn, M. S. Jacobson and B. Thomas, Disc. Math Graph Theory, to appear. Degree sum and vertex dominating paths, with J. R. Faudree, R. J. Faudree, P. Horn and M. S. Jacobson. Journal of Graph Theory, to appear. The following papers have been submitted: The chorded pancyclic problem, with G. Chen, X. Gu, and A. Saito. Submitted to Discrete Math. Extending chorded vertex pancyclic graphs, with M. Cream and K. Hirohata. Submitted to Graphs and Combinatorics. Spanning bipartite graphs with high degree sum in graphs, with Guantao Chen, Shuya Chiba, Xiaofeng Gu, Akira Saito, Masao Tsugaki and Tomoki Tamashita. Submitted to Discrete Math. Click here to return to top
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
I hope everyone enjoyed the photos of Helen and Don O'Shea's garden in our last issue. Helen has also shown me photos of beautiful, new, and different blooms since my visit. I'm planning to stop by the garden again if this rain clears up to see the new display. And now back to our regularly scheduled program -- of walking the Emory campus! We've been to this building/place before, but not this particular area. It's a bit hidden, so in order to find it you will need to do some exploring. It's a lovely area that will be a great stop during a warm day of walking. Where will you find this on the Emory campus?
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Emory University Emeritus College The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206 Atlanta, GA 30329 |
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