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Upcoming Events
Lunch Colloquium
Pablo Palomino
TUESDAY, July 9, 2019
WEBCAST ONLY
Pablo Palomino
TUESDAY, July 9, 2019
Lunch Colloquium
BookFest 2019
Monday, July 22, 2019
WEBCAST ONLY
BookFest 2019
Monday, July 22, 2019
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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
As predicted, our Lunch Colloquium last week by Justin Joyce was a fascinating look at TV and movie westerns through the lens of gunslinging justice. It was particularly fascinating to view The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance within the context of its time (1962) and the societal changes underway at that time and see how the director, John Ford, embedded references, such as a portrait of Abraham Lincoln hanging on the wall behind a close up shot of Pompey. Thanks to Jim Keller, you can read about the colloquium below.
Next week we move from gunslinging to Latin American music. Last week, we learned that westerns portrayed a past that never was. Next week we will see how "Latin American music" helped to create an enduring idea of Latin American culture and identity. You can read about the Lunch Colloquium and Pablo Palomino below. His international background and interdisciplinary expertise should make for a great time for all of us.
Be sure to read about the activities of our members and also review our list of new members. Both of those are among my favorite parts of the newsletter!
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz, Ann Hartle, and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.
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Lunch Colloquium--Tuesday, July 9
The Making of Latin America as a Cultural Region: Identity and Otherness from a Musical Perspective
The Luce Center
Room 130
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, June 24
Gunslinging Justice: The American Culture of Gun Violence in Westerns and the Law
Justin A. Joyce, Research Associate to Provost McBride and Founding and Managing Editor of James Baldwin Review
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Faculty Activities
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New Members
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium--Tuesday, July 9
The Making of Latin America as a Cultural Region: Identity and Otherness from a Musical Perspective Pablo Palomino, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Mellon Faculty Fellow, Oxford College of Emory University
Latin America is less an objective reality than the history of the multiple projects that attempted to create a region out of the intrinsic heterogeneity of the New World. Underlying these projects, a surprisingly wide set of musical practices was crucial to the creation of an enduring idea of Latin American culture and identity. The aesthetic category "Latin American music," in particular, consolidated the cultural identity of this region by connecting highbrow and lowbrow traditions, folk and erudite, popular and commercial music across disparate cultural streams--national, Iberian, European, Pan-American, African, and Indigenous. Based on his upcoming book, The Invention of Latin American Music (Oxford University Press), Pablo's talk will invite us to reflect on our geo-cultural assumptions from a musical perspective.
About Pablo Palomino
Pablo received his BA from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 2005 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2014. He describes his career as follows on academia.edu:
I am a historian of the globalization of culture in 20th-century Latin America. My book in progress, under contract with Oxford University Press, is titled "The Invention of Latin American Music. Transnational Networks and the Emergence of a World Region."
The book approaches Latin America's modern cultural practices through the lens of the transnational dynamics of musical markets, pedagogy, repertoires, state programs, diasporas, musicology, and diplomacy. The global circulation of those practices converged with "populist" policies in the 1910-1960 period, producing a new and inclusive musical scene and also creating a musical-cultural region, "Latin America," transcending national boundaries.
The research has been conducted in Buenos Aires, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Washington D.C., Berlin, and Berkeley.
At Oxford College of Emory University I am designing the Latin American and Caribbean Studies curriculum and teaching a variety of introductory and advanced courses in both English and Spanish. At the same time, as part of a Mellon interdisciplinary program in the Humanities (2017-2020), I am fostering intellectual and pedagogical collaboration among different areas and departments university-wide.
At the University of Chicago I taught the MA Proseminar in Latin American Studies and three history seminars, for undergraduate and graduate students: "Progress and Development in Latin America," "Musical Globalization in Latin America," and "Argentine Histories."
I taught some of these courses before at UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar and before that, in Argentina, I taught modern Latin American social history as a teaching assistant at the University of Buenos Aires and several teachers-training courses on Argentine History and Memory at CePA - Memoria Abierta. This spring, Pablo taught a University Course entitled "Progress: An Interdisciplinary Reflection" that was described as follows: This University Course brings together a wide range of disciplinary perspectives to interrogate to what extent the old concept of "progress" informs our current intellectual and scientific practices. One of the main ideals of modernity, animating political constitutions, scientific paradigms, and philosophical views, including the ideal of the modern university, "progress" morphed during the 20th century into fundamental concepts like "modernization" and "development." At the turn of the 21st century, however, the confidence in our ever-increasing power to analyze the world, cure diseases, and understand nature, coexists with growing skepticism regarding progress, modernization, and development, as a result of profound global changes. "Progress" became thus a "myth"--a positive one taken for granted in the techno-utopias of Silicon Valley, and a negative one in the somber predictions of socioeconomic inequality and climate change. What was not anticipated about this course was that it would go global, as Emory's first "Teach-Out" using the Coursera platform. You can read the Emory News article on this teach-out by clicking here. You can read more about Pablo on his Oxford College website by clicking here.
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, June 24
Gunslinging Justice: The American Culture of Gun Violence in Westerns and the Law Justin A. Joyce, Research Associate to Provost McBride and Founding and Managing Editor of James Baldwin Review
On Tuesday, June 24, we had a packed room for Justin Joyce's talk on Gunslinging Justice, The American Culture of Gun Violence in Westerns and Law, which is also the title of his book that was published in 2018 and can be obtained through Amazon. In the introduction to the book he defines "Westerns as fictional or cinematic narratives that are typically set west of the Mississippi River between the Civil War and World War I, deeply committed to a pastoral or agrarian mode of living, and heavily reliant on stock characters to populate formulaic plots centered on a conflict between social, moral, and juridical paradigms, often coded as a dispute between the wilderness and civilization." Justin Joyce came to Emory in 2017, and he is the Research Associate of Provost Dwight A. McBride and the Founding and Managing Editor, James Baldwin Review.
His presentation was scholarly as well as entertaining given a subject that most in the room had related to as children and young adults. His research uncovered that between 1910 and 1950 a quarter of all Hollywood films were Westerns. This seemed quite astonishing even to the attendees in the room. But quite quickly it became apparent that he was not going to be speaking about movies with Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers (and Dale Evans), or Gene Autry that we viewed as children or young adults on Saturday afternoons or later TV series with the same stars. The Westerns he was referencing were more substantive: High Noon, Rio Bravo, The Gunfighter, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; the last was the center piece of the second half of his presentation.
The topic begs for a certain definition of American nationalistic culture - independent, free-spirited, self-reliant, explorers and risk-takers who believe in individual liberty and individualism. And although many might add that Americans follow the rule of law, the question, at least in relation to the Western, is do we follow English common law or "American frontier law"? English common law "long articulated a citizen's positive duty to retreat in the face of mortal violence"; "as far back as the thirteenth century [it required] one who was threatened with physical force to retreat 'to the wall' at one's back before killing in self-defense." But in the Western's stories "the frontier exists primarily on the outside edge of Europeanized law, a place in which US law is in dispute." Self-defense was an accepted practice "out there." "American self-defense doctrine envisions the exercise of violence in self-defense as a right, a liberty, justified within a legal system that has long traded upon Western conventions like the protection of personal property, the sanctity of private homes, the innovative energy of self-reliant individuals, and the ascendancy of Anglo masculinity." But "such imagery, evoking a frontier where guns replaced legal redress as the primary mode of dispute resolution, owes more to the imagined 'Wild West' of literature and films than to any actual time or place in American history."
The heroes in these Westerns based more on myth than reality were portrayed as cocky, armed believers in self-defense and the taking of the law into their own hands (lawyers were portrayed as an obstacle to "American Law"). These heroes were not the statesmen that formed this country on the rule of law that was transported from England, but rather men who settled frontier land before this law arrived there. They were exclusively white men, skillful with a gun, proud to a fault, fearless, and confrontational. And for them decisions were based on practicality, not morality and legality. The idea of a shared humanity with dignity and protection of the human person was not respected, nor the pursuit of justice and peace in most cases.
And what about the Second Amendment of our Constitution: "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." There has been a major paradigm shift away from a collective duty under the direction of a Militia to the individual right to own arms and the right to self-defense. And the attendant revision of the duty to retreat happened gradually through legal cases. Justice Holmes in the Supreme Court case of Brown v US in 1921 offered this statement: "If a man reasonably believes that he is in immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm from his assailant he may stand his ground and . . . if he kills him he has not exceeded the bounds of lawful self-defense...detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife." And the recent history of killings by police of black men has focused on the issue of deadly force in self-defense, too.
How much of this doctrine entrenched in the American legal system was generated and sustained by these Western movies? Were we brainwashed as children and young adults? Justin avowed, "My aim ... is not to attack or denigrate a genre beloved by many; nor [to write] in defense of the Western's representational politics. Instead, my work stands as an investigation of the stakes and effects these representations have had in the world, working to inform, indeed to create subjectivities." He notes that "much of his thinking about the shift from the sovereign control of violence within English common law to the distribution of power among autonomous citizen-subjects in American self-defense doctrine is indebted to theoretical and critical commentary on sovereignty" (after Foucault).
The second half of the talk was centered on the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. This movie stars Jimmy Stewart as Ransom Stoddard, an idealistic Eastern lawyer moved west who later becomes a governor and senator of a western state, Lee Marvin as the notorious outlaw, Liberty Valance, and John Wayne as Doniphon, a local rancher and friend of Ransom who becomes in a sense his protector. The film was directed by John Ford and released in 1962. Justin skillfully recreated with a Power Point presentation the critical scenes in the movie to demonstrate the issues raised. Ransom, as a lawyer and a rather gentlemanly man, believes in the rule of law, but in the end learns how to use a gun, and the story has it that he killed Liberty Valance in a face to face shootout. He subsequently decides to enter politics but fears his history of killing someone will influence his chance of election. However, in a flashback the audience learns that it really was Doniphon, off to the side of the confrontation in an alley, who killed Valance, shooting his rifle at the same instant Ransom fired his handgun. We learn that Ransom also became aware of this truth, much earlier, and with his conscience clear, decided to embrace political life, but retain the legend, having become aware, too, that his reputation as a killer in such a situation would actually do him political good.
The movie certainly is fueled with multiple philosophical tensions. Ransom, as an Eastern lawyer, is trained to uphold law and order, but in the end, given the circumstances, reverts to the law of the gun. The legend, "the man who shot Liberty Valance," namely Ransom Stoddard, is not true but never corrected even though Ransom knows the shooter was Doniphon. Then finally, Ransom does attempt to correct the legend, telling the true story to a newspaper man when he returns years later for Doniphon's funeral. But the reporter tears up his notes and says, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." So, the legend is never corrected, and Ransom continues to profit from the epithet to promote his political career. The perfidy of this behavior smacks of the practical intelligence associated with a less than honorable lawyer.
Justin also pointed out how the movie rejects the decidedly macho man, Doniphon. In the shootout Stoddard comes out of the shadows wearing an apron from his restaurant duties and appears quite feminine, long-haired and willowy, as remarked by one of the attendees. He is hardly the image of a western gunslinger. But Doniphon, portrayed by John Wayne, certainly has all the makings of a "good guy" masculine hero. However, Doniphon's behavior gives the lie to his heroism in the 1962 era. In the movie his killing of Liberty Valance is spoken of as having been done "in cold blood" given the fact that Doniphon did not confront Valance and did not shoot him head on. He also loses the audience's sympathy as a hero by his racist remarks and behavior (owning the slave, Pompey) and by his disrespect for the woman he is courting, namely Hallie (played by Vera Miles), by trying to put her in her place. Hence the movie confronts a number of jurisprudential and social issues that may have contributed to the decline in the Western's popularity about this time of activism on behalf of Civil Rights and Women's Rights. In 2007 this movie was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
A final reflection? The talk boldly dealt with the human condition, the struggles we all have making moral decisions vs. practical ones, the importance of retaining our good name and reputation, the speaking of truth to power, respect for human dignity, and pursuit of peace and justice. For doing all of this we must thank Justin Joyce and we should also thank him for rubbing our noses in some rather messy stuff in a sophisticated manner--stuff that didn't seem messy when we were children and young adults cheering our Western heroes on; he helped us learn in spite of resistance, the mark of a good teacher.
--James W. Keller
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New Members
New members are the lifeblood of any organization. Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC!
Carol Hogue, PhD, MPH, Professor Emerita of Epidemiology and Jules and Uldeen Terry Professor Emerita of Maternal and Child Health
I earned an MPH and PhD in Epidemiology (minor Biostatistics) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1971 and 1973. Between 1974 and 1977, I served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at UNC. I then joined the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences faculty, with joint appointments in the National Center for Toxicological Research and the State Health Department, serving as the only epidemiologist in the state at that time. I moved to the Centers for Disease Control in 1982 as an EIS Officer, was promoted to Branch Chief in 1982 and to Division Director in the Reproductive Health Division in 1988, a position I held until returning to academia in 1992. At CDC, I developed national linkage of birth and infant death surveillance. My analyses of this system revealed that high educational attainment was not protective against the racial gap in African American infant deaths and triggered further, ongoing research into discrimination as a risk factor for maternal and infant health. I also led the development of CDC's Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) that provides unique data for research, governmental programming, and evaluation. I served as President of both the Society for Epidemiologic Research (1988) and the American College of Epidemiology (2003).
In 1992 I was named to the first endowed professorship awarded at the Rollins School of Public Health, where I established the Women's and Children's Center and led it until my retirement in June 2019. The numerous faculty and graduate students affiliated with the Center have made significant contributions towards understanding preventable causes of racial disparities in women's and infants' health outcomes. My research focuses on public health issues associated with human reproduction, and includes more than 250 papers and more than 50 book chapters and monographs. I have advised the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, the National March of Dimes Foundation, among other agencies. My study of the effects of induced abortion on subsequent fertility challenged accepted knowledge from case-control studies, and its methodology continues to be the gold standard to assess long-term health effects of abortion, as evidenced by the 2018 Consensus Report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, "The Safety and Quality of Abortion Care in the United States." I served as Lead Epidemiologist for the Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network's population-based case-control study of stillbirth, with major findings on the scope and causes of this understudied outcome.
I have loved the inter-disciplinary, challenging, and supportive life of the mind at Emory. I was a member of the Templeton Foundation-sponsored faculty dialogues on science and religion, a Gustafson Scholar, and a Senior Fellow of the Emory Center for the Study of Law and Religion. I was a co-chair and member of the Executive Committee of the Religion and Public Health Collaborative, which has built on Emory's unique strengths in these areas. Holding joint appointments in the School of Medicine and Emory College, I served on Emory's Faculty Council, the provost's Faculty Advisory Committee, and the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Laney Graduate School. I was in the inaugural group of faculty counselors to Emory's Board of Trustees. Two of the most meaningful honors I have received are Emory's Thomas Jefferson Award in 2017 and, in 2019, Emory's establishment of the Carol J. Rowland Hogue Award for Outstanding Mid-Career Achievement, given annually by the Society for Epidemiologic Research to recognize a mid-career scientist who has made an exceptional contribution to the practice of epidemiology.
Sharon W. Weiss, MD, Professor Emerita of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
As I look back on my career of nearly 50 years and my tenure of 21 years at Emory, it does not surprise me that my decision to become a surgical pathologist (made in college, actually) has been one of the best decisions of my life. I cannot imagine another specialty that could have granted me as much satisfaction as pathology. I am enthralled by how pathology combines the science and analytic skills of medicine with the aesthetic interpretation of form and color in the analysis of tissue specimens for the benefit of the patients.
Beginning as a medical student and resident at Johns Hopkins, my career has led me to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (where I acquired my expertise as a soft tissue pathologist studying tumors of the musculoskeletal system and authoring the well recognized textbook, Soft Tissue Tumors, now in its 7th edition), to the University of Michigan, and finally to Emory where I have spent the happiest years of my career. During this time I oversaw the Division of Anatomic Pathology, directed a large international consultation service, and served as Interim Chair of Pathology. As a capstone to my career, I spent a fulfilling decade in the Dean's office as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Faculty Development. As I close these professional doors, I look forward to opening others with the engagement in the vibrant social and intellectual life ofthe Emeritus College.
Affiliate Members
L. Lynn Hogue, PhD, JD, Professor of Law Emeritus, Georgia State University
I have been married to Carol J. Rowland Hogue, the Jules & Uldeen Terry Professor Maternal and Child Health Emerita, since 1966 (the year we both graduated from William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri).
I came to Georgia State in 1982 to help start the College of Law following a semester visit at Emory Law School in the spring of 1981 during which I became acquainted with Ben Johnson, Jr., a long-time former dean and faculty member there who became the founding dean of Georgia State's law school. I retired in 2017, having taught constitutional law, conflict of laws, legal history, and military and national security law as well as other courses. During my final three years at Georgia State I began the College's LLM Program for Foreign-Trained Lawyers. I am the author of numerous articles, chapters, and books including Public Health and the Law (1980), Conflict of Laws in Georgia (1995), and have been co-author with Charles A. Shanor, an emeritus professor of law at Emory, of several editions of Military Law in a Nutshell. I am currently working on a book on Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase for a series published by the University of South Carolina Press.
In addition to my AB (magna cum laude) from William Jewell, I have an MA (1968) and PhD (1972) in English and American Literature from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a JD (1974) from Duke Law School.
I retired as a lieutenant colonel from the United States Army Judge Advocate General's Corps as a reserve officer in 2000 after 21 years of service. I was a Visiting Professor of Law in the law department at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1995-96.
I taught English from 1969-1971 at North Carolina State University and following law school was on the faulty of the School of Government at the University of North Carolina from 1974-1976. After a semester visit at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law (spring 1977), I taught law at the William H. Bowen School of Law at the University of Arkansas Little Rock (1977-1982).
I am licensed to practice law in North Carolina and Georgia and retired from the bar in Arkansas. I have argued cases before the Georgia Supreme Court, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and federal district courts. I currently serve part-time as a Hearing Officer for the Georgia Department of Community Health adjudicating certificate of need appeals, and I serve as the Legal Redress Committee Chair for the Jackson County North Carolina branch of the NAACP.
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Faculty Activities
Sidney Perkowitz Candler Professor of Physics Emeritus Sidney wrote an article for the Spring issue of Emory Medicine titled "The Better to See You With: The evolution of medical imaging, from shoe store X-rays to cancer-tracking nanoparticles." He demonstrates once again his mastery of the intersection of scientist and writer for the lay person.
You can read the article online by clicking here, or read a print version by clicking here.
Medshare Volunteers
Our Medshare Volunteer Committee, led by Marianne Scharbo-DeHaan, is responsible for Emory University being named as one of the 2019 Volunteers of the Year. Her committee has faithfully volunteered every month for many years and would welcome new members. Anyone interested should contact Marianne.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
I'm sure a few of you recognized our last building in question....the O. Wayne Rollins Research Center. My viewpoint was at the end of the building looking up from the courtyard area near the Claudia Nance Rollins and Grace Crum Rollins buildings.
The O. Wayne Rollins Research Center, opened in 1990, includes six floors housing fundamental research laboratories of five departments in the School of Medicine: microbiology and immunology, pharmacology, and physiology, as well as research laboratories in the Department of Biology in Emory College.
As you may recall, we visited this building a few newsletters ago, climbing the immense open staircase that takes you from bottom to top of the building.
During my many walks, I've discovered a few designated quiet spaces on campus. This next walk takes us to one; however, I've found it may or may not be quiet depending on how busy this particular area of campus is!
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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