Newsletter Volume 7 Issue 5 November 4, 2020 |
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My guess is that our next Lunch Colloquium speaker, Yawei Liu, will not be able to talk about the “Next Chapter in U.S.-China Relations” without referencing the results of the election. That will make this our first talk helping us to understand the consequences of the November election and should be a fascinating experience for all.
I have been wanting to hear David Eltis talk about his ground-breaking work on the Atlantic slave trade for many years. His talk, the week after next,will be another demonstration of the advantages of our current virtual world, as he will be talking to us from Vancouver. He is “one of our own” and it is great to connect with a member who lives a continent away.
You can read below about two of our recent talks, by Gretchen Schulz and Kathy Kinlaw, thanks to Liza Davis and Marianne Skeen. The videos of those talks are already on our website, thanks to Don O’Shea and Stacey Jones. The four talks mentioned above along with the talk we heard on Monday by Larry Sperling on heart healthy dietary patterns is an amazing display of the great variety and quality of our programs.
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, November 10
Yawei Liu
“What Is the Next Chapter in U.S.-China Relations?”
Please scroll to read more below
Lunch Colloquium - Tuesday, November 17
David Eltis
Please scroll to read more below
Report - Lunch Colloquium - Monday October 19
Gretchen Schulz
“Déjà vu all over again: Let’s read another story together”
Please scroll to read more below
Report - Lunch Colloquium - Monday, October 26
Kathy Kinlaw
“Pandemic Ethics and Difficult Choices in the Time of COVID-19”
Please scroll to read more below
Faculty Activities
Gary Hauk, Jag Sheth, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Please scroll to read more below
Walking the Campus with Dianne
Please scroll to read more below
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Lunch Colloquium, Tuesday, November 10, 2020 |
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“What Is the Next Chapter in U.S.-China Relations?”
Yawei Liu
Director, China Program, Carter Center, Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Emory University, Associate Director of the China Research Center in Atlanta
Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Exactly 41 years ago, a Georgia native, President Jimmy Carter, made the historic decision to normalize diplomatic relations with China after a 30-year estrangement that began in 1949. This engagement policy is now facing a frontal assault from members of both the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States. Many believe the world's two largest economies have already entered a new Cold War. In this talk, Dr. Yawei Liu, Director of the China Program at the Carter Center, will offer a quick review of the history of engagement, examine how this engagement is now seen by many Americans as a fantasy, discuss the Chinese domestic factors triggering this massive American disillusion, and offer some ideas on what the next chapter in U.S.-China relations is likely to be.
About Yawei Liu:
Yawei Liu is Director of The Carter Center’s China Program. He is a professor of political science at East China Normal University and an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Political Science at Emory.
Dr. Liu earned his BA in English literature from Xian Foreign Languages Institute (1982), an MA in recent Chinese history from the University of Hawaii (1989), and a PhD in American History from Emory University (1996).
Yawei Liu has been a member of numerous Carter Center missions to monitor Chinese village, township, and county people’s congress deputy elections from 1997 to 2011. He has also observed elections in Nicaragua, Peru, and Taiwan. He has written extensively on China’s political developments, grassroots democracy, and US-China relations.
He has edited three Chinese book series: Rural Election and Governance in Contemporary China (Northwestern University Press, Xian, 2002 and 2004), The Political Readers (China Central Translation Bureau Press, 2006) and Elections & Governance (Northwestern University Press, 2008). He is also coauthor of Obama: The Man Who Will Change America (Chinese language, 2008).
Yawei is the founder and editor of China Elections and Governance (www.chinaelections.org, a website sponsored by The Carter Center on political and election issues of China. It was forced off line by the Chinese government in April 2012; it can still be accessed outside China.) He has also published numerous commentaries in Global Times, Study Times, and China Youth Daily. More recently, Yawei helped launch a new magazine called US-China Perception Monitor, part of the new initiative on US-China relations by The Carter Center (www.uscnpm.org).
Yawei is also the associate director of the China Research Center based in Metro Atlanta (since 2007). He was president of the United Society of China Studies (2010-2011). He is a senior fellow at the Chaha’er Institute, a think tank based in Beijing. He is a visiting professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences at Fudan University (since 2008) and a research fellow at the School of International Affairs and Public Administration at Shanghai Jiaotong University (since 2010).
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Lunch Colloquium, Tuesday, November 17, 2020 |
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IBM Punch Cards to Virtual Reality”
David Eltis
Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History Emeritus
Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
In the letter nominating David Eltis for an EUEC Faculty Award of Distinction earlier this year, he was described as “the driving force behind a great international investigation.” Today, he will share the story of that investigation into the slave trade in the Atlantic world, from its origins in archival jottings in 1971, through the compilation of the records of more than 27,000 slave voyages on a CD-ROM in 1999, to the expanded and refined version of the material offered as an open access website in 2008. Still further support from fellow researchers and funding agencies around the world has allowed David and his co-editors to turn their attention to the passengers on the slave ships, yielding the database www.African-origins.org in 2011, and, more recently, information on all the “People of the Atlantic Slave Trade”(PAST). A remarkable story. But, as David will explain, the study of slavery in the Americas, Africa, and Europe has shifted even more dramatically in its substance than has the technology involved. And he’ll answer some key questions that follow from both evolutions: What do we know now that we did not know before slavevoyages.org went live? And (in looking to the future), what are the site’s limitations, and what are we planning to do about them?
About David Eltis:
David Eltis earned his BA in History from Durham University in 1962, his MA in History from the University of Alberta in 1969, and his PhD in History from the University of Rochester in 1979. When he joined the Emory faculty in 2002 as the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History, “he was already a distinguished scholar. His award-winning books on the African slave trade – most notably The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000) – had earned him an enviable reputation as an author. Yet greater acclaim was to come to him as a compiler and editor,” for, as John Juricek explained in a letter he wrote earlier this year nominating David for an Emeritus College Faculty Award of Distinction and as David himself will explain in the Lunch Colloquium he will offer to fellow emeriti at a Zoom session on November 17 (in the talk described just above), he soon “became the driving force behind a great international investigation” into the transatlantic slave trade. (And please note that we will continue to quote from John Juricek’s letter, which you may read in its entirety, if you wish, in the newsletter of May 6, 2020, Vol. 6, Issue 18, through a link in the article covering the Emeritus College Awards Ceremony.)
“In 1992 David began work he hoped might assemble all or most extant records on the slave voyages into a single database.” With support from other scholars from around the world—and with “support from the National Endowment for the Humanities the first compilation was published in 1999 as a CD-ROM: ‘The Transatlantic Slave Trade.’ It contained data on more than 27,000 slave voyages, many from the hitherto little studied South Atlantic.” By 2008, further collaboration and funding had turned the (expanded) CD-ROM material into an online database, www.slavevoages.org, a free, open access website maintained by Emory.
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David was joined by co-editors [not only] on this central project, [but] also on four print publications derived from it. These included the Atlas of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Yale, 2010), recipient of the R.R. Hawkins Award (awarded by the American Publishers Association for the most outstanding scholarly work in all disciplines of arts and sciences). Another NEH grant enabled David and co-editors to produce a related database focused on the slave passengers: www.African-origins.org (2011).
After his retirement from Emory in 2012 David continued to work on these databases . . . . A major grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation in 2018 funded a new project: “People of the Atlantic Slave Trade” (PAST), with David again as co-director. He explained that “Our aim is to extend the primary function of the website from a ship-based record to a people-based record.” That record was now to include all those directly involved in the trade, “whether as an enslaved person, an African seller, a buyer in the Americas, a ship owner or a captain.” The expanded project will also give more attention to the little studied Intra-American slave voyages. When completed the PAST project will be incorporated into www.slavevoyages.org
Henry Louis Gates, Harvard Professor and host of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS, narrates an introductory video to www.slavevoyages.org that credits it with revolutionizing genealogical study by descendants of African slaves all over the Americas. He concludes that “The contributions of this website to the self-knowledge of African-Americans, not just in the U.S., but throughout the New World, cannot be overestimated.’”
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John concluded his letter nominating David for the EUEC Faculty Award of Distinction thus: “Emory University has been honored to have David Eltis -- this great scholar and visionary -- at work among us.” And we are certainly honored to have him offering us a Lunch Colloquium, as well.
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Lunch Colloquium Report--Monday, October 19, 2020 |
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“Déjà vu all over again: Let’s read another story together”
Gretchen Schulz
Professor of English Emerita, Oxford College
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On October 19, we EUEC Zoomers had the pleasure—and privilege—of enjoying a second "class-like" presentation by Dr. Gretchen Schulz. This time, she lectured and led us in a discussion about Joyce Carol Oates’s iconic short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”—a perennial favorite ubiquitous in high school and college literature anthologies. (Oates is pictured on your right.) Gretchen opened her remarks with some biographical details about Oates’s life: her birth in upstate New York in 1938; her early and prolific output as a writer; her academic journey from Syracuse University for her BA in English, to the University of Wisconsin, for her MA in Creative Writing, to Rice University, for her PhD (never completed so she could focus exclusively on her writing). After publishing her first short story collection in 1963, she quickly gained recognition as one of America’s best new writers and in 1978, after years of teaching at the University of Detroit and the University of Windsor in Ontario, she was invited to teach at Princeton in 1978; she left only after retiring in 2014. Oates is currently a visiting professor, teaching writing, at Berkeley. She has written and published an astounding 58 novels, as well as a plethora of short stories, plus plays and poems, and as Gretchen noted, she is “an astute and empathetic” literary critic, too.
Moving to the story, Gretchen revealed that Oates was inspired to write “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” after reading about a seductive serial killer named Charles Schmid in Life Magazine. Schmid’s charisma, James Deanish physical appearance, and gold convertible made him a perfect model for the story’s antagonist, Arnold Friend. Gretchen indicated that Oates drew as well on folk tales, myths, and legends, in particular the timeless story of “Death and the Maiden”--the subject of an early sixteenth-century painting included among the presentation slides. She also noted that Oates sees herself as indebted to Nathaniel Hawthorne for the “realistic allegory” of this piece (and of much of her work), a term suggesting the fusion of the literal and the symbolic, and to Bob Dylan (to whom the story is dedicated) for his seminal song about a girl’s loss of innocence, “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” Before opening the floor for discussion, Gretchen introduced us to a 1985 film version of the story titled Smooth Talk, starring Laura Dern, and treated us to the film’s trailer (with the caveat that its ending differs significantly from the story’s).
To launch the discussion, Gretchen asked why fifteen was an appropriate age for the protagonist Connie. Several EUEC members responded with comments about Connie’s confusion over her identity. We noted the passage in the story in which we are told “Everything about her had two sides to it—one for home and one for anywhere that was not home,” and we agreed she’s like many of her age, hovering on the threshold (as she hovers on the doorstep of her house when Arnold Friend comes to call) between girlhood and womanhood. Gretchen next encouraged us to identify specific folk tales and other literary sources echoed in the story, and respondents cited “Snow White” and “Cinderella,” in which lovely young women await the arrival of a Prince Charming, and also observed parallels with Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood and short story “Good Country People,” with Goethe’s play Faust, with Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, and with biblical references in the Old and New Testaments.
Gretchen also referenced phrasing suggesting Arnold Friend has a lot more in common with the Big Bad Wolf of “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Three Little Pigs” than with Prince Charming, a figure that’s another version of the Death that comes for the Maiden in the stories and paintings Oates has acknowledged as inspiration. (As Brooks Holifield pointed out, the name Arnold Friend is suggestively close to An Old Fiend.) Gretchen noted, too, that “The Pied Piper” resonates with events in the story, given the emphasis on Friend’s association with the music that means so much to Connie and her friends. (And indeed, the Life Magazine story about the real-life inspiration for Friend, Charles Schmid, was entitled “The Pied Piper of Tucson.”)
Towards the end of our conversation, we focused on the description of Connie’s reaction to Friend’s insistence that she come with him for a ride in which he will “show her what love is,” a description in which her increasing terror and increasingly childlike helplessness meld in an interesting way with a response that sounds a lot like the sexual arousal of a woman. Our session ended with discussion of the differences between the ending of the story, in which Connie pushes out the door of the house on her way to a probable rape and murder, and the ending of the film, in which Connie spends time with Friend in unseen sex, and then returns home to insist that he never return—and to reconcile with the family members she’d been fighting with earlier in the day. As Gretchen reported, Oates has said that she approves of the way Joyce Chopra, director of the movie, chose to end her version of the story. Many of the characters in Oates' work that do suffer trauma of the sort that Connie seems headed for do nonetheless survive and thrive. And she finds Chopra’s suggestion that that’s the case for Connie “uplifting.”
--Liza Davis
And here is information Gretchen promised to provide those who might wish to watch the movie and/or the discussion of the story and the movie that was recorded just a few weeks ago at Lincoln Center in conjunction with the New York Film Festival’s celebration of women and film. Joyce Carol Oates and Joyce Chopra and Laura Dern, who played Connie when she was herself only fifteen, talked for an hour about this material. Fascinating.
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Lunch Colloquium Report--Monday, October 26, 2020 |
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“Pandemic Ethics and Difficult Choices in the Time of COVID-19”
Kathy Kinlaw
Associate Director, Emory Center for Ethics; Assistant Professor, Pediatrics
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At the Lunch Colloquium on Monday, October 26, Kathy Kinlaw, Associate Director of the Emory Center for Ethics, spoke to us about “Pandemic Ethics and Difficult Choices in the Time of COVID 19.” As we are hearing daily of the predicted rise in COVID-19 case numbers during the fall months and once again facing limited resources for fighting this pandemic, the topic couldn’t have been more timely. Our speaker provided a brief overview of the history of pandemics before addressing ethical issues surrounding our societal response to this pandemic. Epidemics are defined as a sudden increase of a disease. When the disease crosses international boundaries and becomes worldwide, it is a pandemic.
Over the centuries, infectious disease transmission increased when hunter gatherers became more agrarian, bringing people closer together. Another major change occurred when Europeans came to the new world, bringing diseases to indigenous populations who had no resistance to them. In the 16th and 17th centuries, this phenomenon killed more than 56 million people native to the Americas. Over the past hundred years, we have experienced influenza pandemics in 1918, 1957, 1968, and 2009, with the 1918 event by far the worst. Exacerbated by war and international troop movements and a lack of vaccine, the 1918 flu pandemic killed an estimated 20-59 million people worldwide, 675,000 of those in the US. By comparison, routine US influenza infections over the past 10 years have resulted in an average of 200,000 hospitalizations annually and 12-61,000 deaths per year. In the 21st century we have experienced three pandemics caused by corona viruses. COVID-19 has proved especially challenging because of its ease of transmission and its deadly effects for the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. It is a completely new disease, so vaccine development has had to start from scratch.
In the absence of a vaccine for COVID-19, preventive measures have relied on use of masks, physical distancing, and basic hygiene. Ethical issues surrounding these recommendations involve the balance between individual freedoms and a sense of community benefit. Are mandated limitations on our behaviors proportional to the benefit they can provide? How can anticipated benefits be communicated in a way that will receive support from the community? Because of the rapid spread of COVID-19 and the politicization of the response, it has been difficult to engage the public in these deliberations.
In 2009, public health experts predicted a future pandemic that could overwhelm medical facilities and cause between 2 and 7.4 million deaths worldwide. This led to a great deal of preparedness planning and modeling to project resources that would be needed. At the time, we in the US led the world in efforts at such preparedness, but these efforts received less attention and less support when nothing major happened. The current administration cut the various sources of support considerably. When the pandemic got to us, we were not well prepared. As of the date of this presentation, 1.15 million global deaths have been reported, 225,000 of them in the US.
Unsurprisingly in this threatening situation, medical ethicists are examining allocation ethics, both for treatment options, such as allocation of limited critical care resources, and for preventive measures, such as allocation of limited supplies of vaccines when they become available. The overarching goals are to minimize bad outcomes and save as many lives as possible, but how to achieve this? There are some differences in ethical issues associated with treatment and prevention priorities, but many of them overlap. Ethicists consider variables such as likelihood of recovery and expected life years saved when looking at treatment options. The estimate of life years saved is not based strictly on age, but includes a broader evaluation of underlying health. Multiplier effects include things like prioritizing treatment for healthcare workers who can then save others. Who else should be considered essential? Grocery store workers? Delivery people? Should people most likely to infect others receive priority for vaccines? How can societal function be preserved? It is vital to avoid any criteria that might discriminate based on factors such as wealth, race, physical disability, age, or gender. Social worth and status should not be considered. First come, first served is not a valid approach for vaccine allocation because it discriminates against those with less access to things like transportation and relevant information. There must be fairness of distribution to all segments of the population.
Transparency and input from the community are important when developing guidelines on these matters, but very difficult to achieve when speed is of the essence. Emory Healthcare is developing guidelines and also participates in a consortium of healthcare providers in the region. Some states have themselves developed guidelines. Georgia does not currently have a plan for pandemic ethics. However, multiple panels are developing vaccine allocation proposals, considering criteria for prioritizing recipients such as essential workers, people in communal living situations, high-risk individuals, and populations disproportionately affected due to existing disparities in our social structures. Development of guidelines is a complex process, exacerbated by tension between state and federal decision-making. Even when there are guidelines, who makes the decisions and who monitors the process?
As the week ended, reports from Belgium, the European hot spot where cases are surging, indicated that rapidly increasing hospitalizations may force difficult decisions regarding access to care in the days ahead in many other areas of the globe, as well.
--Marianne Skeen
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Gary Hauk
Former Emory Vice President, Deputy to the President, University Historian
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Jagdish Sheth
Charles H. Kellstadt Chair in Marketing
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It has just been announced that the Bengaluru-based IFIM B-school, has been named the Jagdish Sheth School of Management. Global thinker and Padma Bhushan awardee Prof Jagdish Sheth accepted the request of present chairman Sanjay Padode to rename the school after him. This, Padode said, is one of the rare instances where an institution is being named to honor a globally renowned Indian academician and is not based on any endowment or grant.
IFIM not only got his name, but also his guidance, as Prof Sheth is now the chairman of the school. This step is also a booster shot for the faculty. Padode said that the faculty looks at Professor Sheth with awe, and his lending his name is a testimony to their achievements. “It’s a new journey for them as well.”
Professor Sheth added, “As India gets globally integrated, it will become increasingly necessary for management schools to meet or exceed global benchmarks, global accreditations and global recognitions. I am honored with this step (by IFIM).”
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Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Professor Emerita of English
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On October 27, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson was a guest on a podcast hosted by Laura Hercher with the topic of "Difference or Disability." Information on the podcast begins as follows:
Join Laura as she pursues the question of disability rights in light of prenatal genetic testing today.
Her guest is Rosemarie Garland Thomson, a professor of English and bioethics at Emory University and a person who has "lived and experienced being a disabled person."
After Rosemarie sets the stage with a history of disability rights in America and a definition of disability as socially constructed along with gender and race, Laura asks, "Is it a difference or a disability?" and also asks whether this is a useful question.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne |
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The majestic fireplace and Dooley chairs from our last walk can be found at the Campus Life Pavilion located at 716 Peavine Creek Drive, not far from the sculpture we looked at on our previous walk.
The Pavilion opened September 2016 and provides an outdoor space to Emory students and community members for various programs. The site was the Black Student Association (BSA) House from 1986-2011. The current BSA house is located at 22 Eagle Row.
The Campus Life Pavilion was dedicated to the 13 Black students “who integrated Emory in 1962 and 1963.” A steel beam on the entrance of the building (see below) now features 13 stars, representing each of the students. A plaque below the beam (see below) states that the Pavilion honors the students who integrated Emory, the BSA house inhabitants, and everyone else who has contributed to Emory’s multicultural community.
It's a lovely place, and I'm sure once the pandemic clears, the Pavilion will see lots of activity again.
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Let's do something a little different with this walk...rather than have you guess the location on campus, I'm going to give you a glimpse of what the campus looks like in pandemic times. Many buildings are, of course, closed to a certain degree, and many can be seen with designated social distance spaces, signs, and tents outside to allow students, faculty, and staff alternative places to eat, congregate, or have meetings more easily at the required social distance.
Put on your mask, stay six feet away, and walk with me ...
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Emory University Emeritus College
The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206
Atlanta, GA 30329
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