FOUNDERS WEEK, a midwinter academic festival of the arts and sciences, provides a stepping stone midway between the annual academic celebrations of Opening Convocation and Commencement and celebrates the role of the University in promoting inquiry and intellectual life. The week-long festival of academic, social, and cultural events commemorates the founding of Emory College in 1836.
Co-sponsored by the Office of the President, the Dean of Emory College, the Office for Undergraduate Education, Oxford College, Emory Alumni Association, and the Senior Vice President for Campus Life. Founders Week events are open to the public, and most events are free.
Check our site again for further details and other forthcoming events.
For more information, please call (404) 727-6257.
View events on a specific day:
8:00 p.m.
Mike Yoshida, marimba, and Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta Series Concert
Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall
Tickets: Public $20 / Patrons under 18 and over 65 $15 / Emory students Free
The popular marimba player from Japan joins ECMSA members in music of Steve Reich, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven.
2:30 p.m.
Perspectives on Performance: Benny Golson, saxophone
Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall
The Emory Coca-Cola Artists in Residence Program seeks to substantially increase the depth, diversity and profile of performing arts education in the Emory and greater Atlanta communities by providing opportunities for meaningful contact with the finest and most significant artists and arts scholars from throughout the world.
8:00 p.m.
Emory Annual Jazz Fest Concert: Benny Golson, saxophone, with the Gary Motley Trio
Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall
Tickets: Public $15 / Patrons under 18 and over 65 $10 / Emory students Free
Renowned tenor saxophonist, composer, arranger, lyricist and producer, Benny Golson, received his musical training in the bands of Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Earl Bostic and Art Blakey. Few jazz musicians can boast of a performing and recording career that spans over 50 years and literally redefines the term “jazz.” A prodigious writer, Golson has written well over 300 compositions including eight standards for jazz repertoire that are still being recorded and various works for radio, television and film. Golson has also composed and arranged music for such jazz greats as Count Basie, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sammy Davis Jr., Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie among others. Amid touring and teaching, Golson is currently working on a major college textbook and an autobiography. This fall he will be awarded the Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award at the Kennedy Center presented by the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.
8:00 p.m.
Emory Annual Jazz Big Band Night
Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall
4:00 p.m.
“Musical Offering” by the Atlanta Bach Ensemble
Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall
Four outstanding musicians—Jun Ching Lin, violin; Carl Hall, flute; Peter Lemonds, cello; and Timothy Albrecht, harpsichord and organ—team together to perform Bach’s 1747 chamber music masterpiece.
8:00 p.m.
Film screening: My Son John
White Hall 205
4:00 p.m.
Distinguished Faculty Lecture: “Adolescent Brain Development, Risk-Taking, and Mental Health” Dobbs University Center, Winship Ballroom
The Emory University Faculty Council presents the thirteenth annual Distinguished Faculty Lecture, given by Elaine Walker, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Emory College. A Reception will follow the lecture.
6:30-8:00 p.m.
Transforming Community Project
Experiencing Race at Emory
Panel Discussion: “Three Part Harmony: Listening to the Voices of Emory, Morehouse and Grady”
Cannon Chapel
The past, present and future of Grady Hospital provide the context for the third annual Experiencing Race at Emory event, sponsored by the Transforming Community Project. Members of Emory, Morehouse School of Medicine and Grady Hospital will describe their experiences at this historic and current trauma center. Gary Hauk (Emory), author of A Legacy of Heart and Mind: Emory Since 1836, will moderate this public discussion. Members of the Atlanta community are welcome to attend. For more information, contact the Transforming Community Project at 404-727-6198 or tcp@learnlink.emory.edu. Co-sponsored by Emory College.
6:00 p.m.
Oded Borowski Lecture: “Archaeology of Destruction: Daily Life in Ancient Judah as it Emerges from Ruins”
Callaway Center S-319
Through the Summer Abroad Program, Emory University has been involved in biblical archaeology since 1979. Under the guidance of Professor Oded Borowski, Emory undergraduate and graduate students participated in excavations in Israel at different sites, mostly at Tell Halif (biblical Rimmon) located in the hill country not far from Beersheba. Last summer, a group of students returned to Tell Halif for an exciting field season full of discoveries pertaining to the history and daily life of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah in the 8th century BCE. This session will present some of the most important last summer discoveries and the latest conclusions concerning our work.
8:00 p.m.
Film screening: On the Waterfront
White Hall 205
This compelling, moving drama about labor politics and corrupt union bosses among longshoremen was shot on location in New Jersey (by master cinematographer Boris Kaufman) and performed by some of America's finest screen actors of the period—Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Lee J. Cobb and Karl Maulden. It also swept the Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction Editing). It has often been interpreted as an allegory that justified director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg's decisions to testify as a friendly witness to the House Committee on Un-American Activities as it investigated Communist infiltration of Hollywood.
12:00 noon - 2:00 p.m.
Philip V. Bohlman Lecture and Performance: "The Silence of Transcendence"
Carlos Museum Reception Hall (free)
Philip V. Bohlman will give a lecture, “The Silence of Transcendence,” followed by a performance of Viktor Ullmann’s setting of Ranier Maria Rilke’s “The Chronicle of Love and Death of the Flag-Bearer Christoph Rilke” (Theresienstadt, 1944). This piece is the final work for stage by Jewish artists in the Terezín/Theresienstadt concentration camp. Amid the unimaginable conditions of the camp, composers, instrumentalists, opera singers, and actors maintained a spiritual resistance by continuing their artistic endeavors. They sang opera and organized classical and popular music concerts. Ullman, a Czech composer interned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, was among the Jewish composers ultimately murdered at Theresienstadt. Clinging to life, yet facing almost certain death, these Jewish artists expressed their creative genius and left this precious and tragic legacy for humankind. Presented by Philip V. Bohlman and Christine Wilkie Bohlman, University of Chicago.
Philip V. Bohlman is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities and of Music at the University of Chicago, where he also holds adjunct positions in the Divinity School, Germanic Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and South Asian Studies. A pianist, he is also the Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, a Jewish cabaret and Ensemble-in-Residence at the University of Chicago. He has written and published extensively, and among his most recent books are World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002; translated into five languages), The Music of European Nationalism (ABC-CLIO, 2004; 2nd revised edition, Routledge, 2008), Jüdische Musik – Eine mitteleuropäische Geistesgeschichte (Böhlau, 2005), and Jewish Music and Modernity (AMS Studies in Music, 2008). Philip Bohlman was awarded the Edward Dent Medal by the Royal Music Association in 1997, the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin in 2003, and the 2007 Derek Allen Prize for Musicology by the British Academy, to which he was elected as a Corresponding Fellow in 2007.
Christine Wilkie Bohlman teaches piano and chamber music at the University of Chicago. A student of Carroll Chilton (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Russell Sherman (New England Conservatory), and Menachem Pressler (Indiana University), she specializes in music of the Baroque and Classical periods and contemporary music, and is active as a chamber musician. Recently, she has performed at Yale, NYU, Bard College, University College Cork, the University of Chicago, and the Warburg Institute in London. Christine Bohlman is also active as a pedagogue, having taught at MacMurray College, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Merit School of Music in Chicago, where she served also as chair of the Music Theory Program.
6:30 p.m.
Issues Troupe Reception and Play: "A Beautiful Disaster"
Winship Ballroom
This play, performed by the Office of Multicultural Programs' Issues Troupe, focuses on Emory's multicultural student community, including vignettes about interracial dating, racial/cultural group interactions, and different perceptions and reactions about "diversity." The play's purpose is not to offer solutions, but to function as a spring board for the Emory Community to talk about diversity issues and come up with their own solutions together. The play is written by Amber Jackson '09, who researched and created this work as a summer SIRE fellow with faculty Ariel deMan in Theater Studies. Meet and Mingle reception starts at 6:30 p.m. with the play starting at 7 p.m. Talk back discussion regarding the play's issues about race relations on campus will immediately follow the performance. The multi-media play is directed by Ken Hornbeck.
8:00 p.m.
Harvey Klehr Lecture: “Espionage, Informing and the Movies: Hollywood's Communist Problem”
White Hall 205
The Hollywood blacklist has dominated discussion of the communist issue in the movie industry. Using two anti-communist movies of the 1950s—My Son John and On the Waterfront—one an award-winning classic, the other a widely derided melodrama, as starting points, Harvey Klehr will consider the curious failure of imagination and historical memory that characterized Hollywood's treatment of the Communist issue.
Harvey Klehr is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory. He is the author or co-author of eleven books. His newest book, Early Cold War Spies, written with John Haynes, was published by Cambridge University Press. He has received the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award for Emory College, the University Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award and the Thomas Jefferson Award from Emory. He is currently a member of the National Council on the Humanities.
2:30 p.m.
Perspectives on Performance: Kronos Quartet - CANCELLED
Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall
Kronos members David Harrington and John Sherba, violins, Hank Dutt, viola, and Jeffrey Zeigler, cello, boldly explore the range and context of string quartet music, from unorthodox interdisciplinary events with eclectic collaborators to more traditional concerts with the stars of classical music. Over the course of three decades Kronos has produced more than forty recordings, given 1,000 international concerts, and participated in hundreds of commissions and collaborations.
4:15 p.m.
Sean D. Kirkland lecture: “The Tragic Foundations of Aristotelian Ethics”
White Hall 206
This lecture will address the peculiar kind of foundation that is involved in living an ethical life for Aristotle. Indeed, this foundation is not at all a static and stable base upon which one erects a structure, but an action or a task that must be repeated every time anew. Because Aristotle’s ethics has no recourse to absolute moral principles, which other thinkers might presume to secure from religious doctrine, tradition, intuition, or even pure reason, the indeterminacy of human existence is not overcome in living an ethical life. Rather, according to Professor Kirkland’s interpretation of Aristotle’s Ethics, the foundation of an ethical life must be re-enacted over and over, each time confronting (not transcending) the tragic limitations of human understanding and power.
5:30-7:30 p.m.
Opening Reception and Gallery Talk: Trying to Make Art with a Camera: Photographic Strategies and Traditional Media by William A. Brown
Emory Visual Arts Gallery
The evening will consist of a gallery talk by the artist, accompanied by a reception featuring food, wine, and a dynamic selection of international music selected by the artist to complement the artwork. William Brown, a faculty member of Emory University since 1974 and primarily known as an avant-garde filmmaker, will present video screenings and recent still photography that subvert traditional notions that define the boundaries separating painting and sculpture from emerging and technological media. Works in the exhibition will include proposals for paintings and sculptural works based on photographic images, video works that are related to traditional still photography concerns, still images using cinematic conventions, and collaborative works with sculptor Kerry Moore (also on Emory's faculty) and composer Neil Fried. The exhibition will be on view through March 15, 2008 in the Emory Visual Arts Gallery.
The Emory Saxophone Quartet will accompany the gallery reception. The Quartet has dazzled Atlanta audiences since 2000, performing original saxophone quartet repertoire and exciting classical and jazz transcriptions. Members include Dr. Jan Berry Baker (artist affiliate faculty), Dr. Scott Stewart (Director of Wind Studies), David Johnson (Emory University School of Medicine), and Williams Pitts (Emory College). The ensemble performs regular recitals, visits schools, and plays at receptions, weddings, parties, and other festive events
6:00-8:30 p.m.
Sustainability Summit on Food
Cox Hall Ballroom
Sponsored by the Office of Sustainability Initiatives and the Center for Ethics. In the first of a series of Sustainability Summits, seventy-give graduate and undergraduate students will develop recommendations to Campus Dining for sustainable food purchases, through a decision-making exercise using menus and real prices.
8:00 p.m.
Horace Newcomb Lecture: “Television in Transition: Chaos, Confusion, and Promises”
White Hall 205
Television is in a state of transition as profound as any in the medium's history. An explosion of distribution devices has changed relationships among creators, producers, viewers, advertisers and a host of other entities. There's no way to predict the future, but this lecture will consider what has been gained -- and lost.
Horace Newcomb holds the Lambdin Kay Chair for the Peabodys in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. Newcomb is the author of TV: The Most Popular Art (Doubleday/ Anchor, 1974), co-author of The Producer's Medium (Oxford University Press, 1983), and editor of seven editions of Television: The Critical View (Oxford University Press, 1976-2006). In 1973-74, while teaching full time, he was also the daily television columnist for the Baltimore Morning Sun. From 1994-96 he served as Curator for the Museum of Broadcast Communications (Chicago) with primary duties as editor of The Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Television (Taylor & Francis, 2nd edition, 2004), a four- volume, 2,600 page reference work containing more than 1,200 entries on major people, programs, and topics related to television in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The MBC Encyclopedia of Television is the definitive library reference work of first record for the study of television. Newcomb is also author of numerous articles in scholarly journals, magazines and newspapers.
12:00 noon
Gary Hauk Lecture: “Twice Upon a Time: The Founding and Re-founding of Emory”
Woodruff Library, Jones Room 311
A look at the current trajectory into Emory’s future suggests that it is a seamless and natural development of the University’s past. “Where we are going” can be understood in the context of “where we have been”; “why we are going there” can be answered by the description, “this is who we are.”
5:30 p.m.
Open House for Educators
Michael C. Carlos Museum
Curators Peter Lacovara and Jessica Stephenson introduce Lost Kingdoms of the Nile: Nubian Treasures from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, on view until August 2008, and the new installation of the Museum’s permanent collection of sub-Saharan African art. Tour the galleries, and enjoy wine and hors d’oeuvres and a 10% discount in the Museum bookshop. RSVP by February 1 by calling 404-727-2363.
7:30 p.m.
Movie Mania Film Series: Lady in the Dark
White Hall 205
Film series presented by the Atlanta Psychoanalytic Society, The Atlanta Foundation for Psychoanalysis, and The Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. Each movie followed by a psychoanalytic discussion.
Originally a play and then a TV presentation in 1954, this is the story of the analysis of an emotionally scarred woman, illustrating the connection between the mind and a person's actions.
10:00 a.m.
Exhibition Opening: “Lost Kingdoms of the Nile: Nubian Treasures from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston”
Michael C. Carlos Museum
Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in conjunction with the Carlos Museum, Lost Kingdoms of the Nile features some of the most significant archaeological treasures ever found in Africa. This monumental exhibition—consisting of over 250 objects in gold, silver, bronze, ivory, stone, and ceramic ranging in date from 7000 B.C. to modern times—provides unprecedented insight into ancient Nubia, the extraordinary African civilization that has often been overshadowed by ancient Egypt.
Ancient Nubia thrived from 6000 BC to 350 AD in what is today southern Egypt and northern Sudan. The exhibition highlights not only some of the finest artworks ever found in ancient Africa but also the remarkable stories of their discovery by the intrepid archaeologists who were part of the Harvard-Boston Expedition from 1913 to 1932.
Highlights of the exhibition include:
• An exquisite golden royal diadem, which will be reconstructed in its entirety for the first time.
• Finely crafted ceramics, including some of the earliest pottery in the world.
• Treasures from the royal Nubian tombs, including part of an army of shawabti figurines buried to work for the Nubian kings who ruled over the areas of both modern-day Egypt and the Sudan.
• Inscriptions in the mysterious language of Nubia.
The exhibit runs through August 31, 2008
10:00 a.m.
Sub-Saharan Galleries Reopening
Michael C. Carlos Museum
10:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Sustainability Summit on Food
Cox Hall Ballroom
Sponsored by the Office of Sustainability Initiatives and the Center for Ethics.
8:00 p.m.-1:00 a.m.
Founders Ball
Emory Conference Center Hotel
Hail the Gold and Blue! The week of celebratory events culminates in the Founders Ball, an evening of dancing, music, and refreshments, in celebration of the founding of Emory. Swing to the Big Band sounds, and enjoy birthday cake and a presidential toast. Bring your Valentine!
Tickets will be on sale at the DUC beginning in January and at the door on the evening of the event, and alumni may register on-line at www.emory.edu/events.
8:00 p.m.
Kronos Quartet with Wu Man, pipa
Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall
Tickets: Full price $52 / Discount category members $39 / Emory students $5
Kronos members David Harrington and John Sherba, violins, Hank Dutt, viola, and Jeffrey Zeigler, cello, boldly explore the range and context of string quartet music, from unorthodox interdisciplinary events with eclectic collaborators to more traditional concerts with the stars of classical music. Over the course of three decades Kronos has produced more than forty recordings, given 1,000 international concerts, and participated in hundreds of commissions and collaborations.
Wu Man is known for introducing Western audiences to the pipa, a lute-like Chinese instrument with a more than 2,000-year history. She is a virtuoso in traditional repertoire and a leader in contemporary pipa music by composers such as Philip Glass, Tan Dun, and Bright Sheng. She will join Kronos to perform The Cusp of Magic by Terry Riley.
4:00 p.m.
Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta Family Series: “Chinese New Year Celebration” with the Vega String Quartet
Michael C. Carlos Museum Reception Hall
Tickets, $4, are available at www.arts.emory.edu or at the Arts Box Office at 404-727-5050
In this annual celebration, the Vega String Quartet, originally from Shanghai, is joined by traditional Chinese instruments, the erhu and the pipa.
5:00 p.m.
Salman Rushdie Lecture: “Autobiography and the Novel”
Glenn Memorial Auditorium
Tickets $10 general public, $5 Emory faculty, staff, students, alumni
Tickets will be available after January 10th at www.emory.edu/events/.
The lecture will be an examination of how the lives of writers intertwine with their work, and in what ways, if at all, the life can be said to be the best explanation of that work. People nowadays assume that all fiction is somehow autobiographically inspired. And of course life and experience have always contributed to art. But the fictionality of fiction is what makes it worthwhile.
“Democratic Vistas: Exploring the Danowski Poetry Collection”
Woodruff Library, Schatten Gallery
This free exhibit runs January 15-May 19, 2008 in the Main and Corridor Galleries, Schatten Gallery, Robert W. Woodruff Library, 540 Asbury Circle, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322. For more information call 404-727-5050 or see www.arts.emory.edu. Highlights from Emory’s Raymond Danowski Poetry Collection will be showcased.
"From the Poet's Desk: An Exhibition of Poems in Process from MARBL's Literacy Collections"
Woodruff library, Manuscript Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL)
January 15-May 21
"Robert Rauschenberg's Currents: Features and Surface Series"
Michael C. Carlos Museum
Closes February 17