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Upcoming Events
March 19, 2018
Lunch Colloquium
Erika V. Hall
April 5, 2018 EUEC Distinguished Awards and Heilbrun Fellowship April 10, 2018 Lunch Colloquium Payson Kennedy
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Contact Other Members
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find out about a travel destination or find other EUEC members who would like to travel with you, send an email to:
Find other members to get together for shared interests, whether it is forming a book club or a photography club, or getting together to take a hike. Send email to the following link to contact members who would like the same activity!
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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
We have had two great talks since the last newsletter and another one is coming next week. What a feast! Howard Kushner's talk on left-handedness generated a lot of interest, and thanks to Tony Gal you can read about it below; the video of his talk will soon be on our website as well. Although many estimates of left-handedness suggest that only about 10% of people are left-handed, a survey of those attending Howard's talk suggested that the number was closer to 50%--perhaps a biased sample?
Katherine Mitchell's talk was not only interesting but beautifully illustrated as well, and she also brought some samples of her artwork. Tiny Westbrook's article below will give you a taste of what we experienced, and the recording of Katherine's talk will also soon be on our website.
Continuing our theme of having rich and varied programs, next week we get to hear Erika Hall talk about her research on racial bias in policing. This is an incredibly important topic, and it is fascinating that we will hear about it from a faculty member in the business school!
It is a great pleasure to see the article just published in Emory Report about our Retirement Mentoring Program. A part of the article is in this newsletter and there is a link to the rest of it. I hope you get a chance to read the entire article because I believe it is one of the most important programs that we offer to faculty considering retirement. Thanks to EUEC Member Pat Douglass who spearheaded the process of getting the program up and running along with Paula Gomes and Marilyn Hazzard Lineberger in the Faculty Staff Assistance Program. Thanks also to our members who have become mentors and to Helen O'Shea who is chairing our Retirement Mentoring Committee.
I am very grateful to John Bugge, Herb Benario, and Gretchen Schulz for help with proofing and editing.
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Lunch Colloquium March 19
 Black and Blue: Exploring Racial Bias and Law Enforcement in the Killings of Unarmed Black Male Civilians The Luce Center Room 130 11:30-1:00
Erika V. Hall, Assistant Professor of Organization and Management, Goizueta Business School
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Lunch Colloquium March 5
Hearing the Trees: Works from an Exhibition
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Howard Kushner February 28 Afternoon Seminar
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New Members
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Our Retirement Mentoring Program has Made the News!
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Helen O'Shea and Susan Shapiro Emory Photo/Video
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Kimber Williams of Emory News has just published an article about our Retirement Mentoring program. The article begins: When Susan Shapiro began thinking about retiring from Emory's Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing about five years ago, her first objective was seeing through a federally funded research project. Project funding would run through June 2016, and Shapiro, who at the time was serving as a clinical professor and assistant dean in the School of Nursing and a corporate director for research in Emory Healthcare Nursing, envisioned following that trajectory toward retirement. However, about six months before her anticipated retirement, she was invited to attend an Emeritus College presentation intended to help Emory employees begin thinking about what retirement could actually look like - not so much the financial implications, but the practical aspects about how her life could change. She was also offered the opportunity to be paired with a pre-retirement mentor, an Emory faculty member who had already walked the road toward retirement and could answer and pose some important and practical questions, including some she'd never considered. That's how Shapiro began meeting informally with Helen O'Shea, a professor emerita who retired in 2011 after 40 years of teaching at Emory's School of Nursing. The entire article can be read by clicking here and I encourage you to read it, as it does a great job of presenting what is one of the best programs we offer to faculty considering retirement.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium March 19
Black and Blue: Exploring Racial Bias and Law Enforcement in the Killings of Unarmed Black Male Civilians
Erika V. Hall, Assistant Professor of Organization and Management, Goizueta Business School
"Intersectionality" is the word that best characterizes Erika Hall's research, focusing as it does on the influence of race, gender, and class-based implicit biases on interactions within the workplace and society as a whole. Her presentation for the Colloquium will, however, center on one kind of bias in particular, namely, racial bias, and how the attitudes associated with skin color affect interactions between the police and the members of the public whom they're charged to "protect and serve." She will share the results of others' studies of this complex subject (and her own)--results she earlier shared with (other) scholarly colleagues in an article published in American Psychologist.
About Erika HallErika V. Hall joined the Goizueta Business School faculty in 2014. Hall earned a Bachelor's in Finance from the University of Maryland and a Master's and PhD in Management & Organizations from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. As noted above, her research focuses on the influence of race, gender, and class-based implicit biases on interactions within the workplace and the broader society. Further, Professor Hall looks at how leaders with multiple minority identities are perceived in teams and organizations. Professor Hall's work has appeared in academic journals such as Psychological Science, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; and in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and NPR. Prior to graduate school, Hall was a Research Associate at Harvard Business School. An article about Erika by Isabel Hughes in Emory News begins: Erika Hall, assistant professor of organization and management at Goizueta Business School, is making headlines. Beyond the attention to her academic research, she was recently named to the Atlanta Business Chronicle's "30 Under 30" list. Hall joined the Goizueta faculty in fall 2014. While she teaches negotiations to BBA and MBA students, her passion for research is driven by racial and gender inequalities she sees on a day-to-day basis both inside and outside the business world. The entire article can be read by clicking here. Click here to return to top
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Lunch Colloquium March 5
Hearing the Trees: Works from an ExhibitionKatherine Mitchell, Artist, Senior Lecturer Emerita, Visual Arts Department
On Monday, March 5, the artist Katherine Mitchell, Emory Senior Lecturer Emerita, intrigued an attentive audience at the EUEC colloquium lunch with her spirited presentation entitled "Hearing the Trees: Works from an Exhibition." Accompanied by slides, her lecture guided us through the intricate processes of her work exhibited at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at Appalachian State University. This exhibition was funded in part by a Bianchi Grant of the Emeritus College. The original inspiration for the two-dimensional mixed media drawings and a wall installation was a beloved white oak, struggling and distressed, on Ms. Mitchell's property. Her artwork is a moving tribute to her tree and a visual appeal to all of us concerning our entire endangered natural environment. As always, these drawings show her interest in geometric and architectural form as well as in the world of nature. In a layering of systems and patterns, she also used texts from her journals, lines of poetry and various prose quotations such as from Alexander von Humboldt, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Roosevelt, W.S. Graham and many others. These layers were then overlaid with leaves, acorns or small sticks from her tree or other trees. She began her presentation with a slide of an 1878 J.W. Lauderbach engraving of a magnificent Chestnut tree, a melancholy reminder of what was irretrievably lost from the American landscape.
That sense of loss seemed to have inspired the first image of this series, entitled "Oak and Rain," a drawing in a gray grid with white squares, a yellow oak leaf in the center and white little rain rectangles radiating from that center. Next was "Struggle," illustrating vivid signs of disease - tiny amber spots, the eggs of a certain kind of wasp - shown on an oak leaf in the center of the drawing. That was followed by another drawing entitled "Hope," a hope that the Oak tree might recover. It shows those "deadly eggs" moving across the oak leaf, hopefully without affecting the leaf.
Since our artist was observing her White Oak over time, the following 15 differently sized images Ms. Mitchell presented reflect or address the many and varying responses she experienced: feelings ("White Oak Night"), moods ("Movements," "Night Mist"), observations ("The Lone Tree"), or fears and threats ("White Oak at Night," "Chaos," "Rain After Fire," and "Ghost Trees"), as well as environmental implications ("Lichen," "Through Snowy Woods"), those not only affecting her tree ("White Oak"), but trees in general as in "Mycelial Web." This drawing, for example, refers specifically to a "communication system among and between trees. It enables them to nourish each other, and even to protect each other from various diseases and insects. It consists of root structures, earth and leaf mulch, and a variety of fungi," explained Ms. Mitchell and called her drawing a poetic rather than a scientific rendition of this idea.
The beautifully changing colors, such as for example the Alaska-inspired arctic blues in the drawings "Cold Moon" and "Blue Leaf" or the many shades of yellows, blacks and grays indeed create that kind of "rhythm of color" often associated with Ms. Mitchell's art. To this she adds that fascinating variety of writings, geometric shapes, and media - for example a layer of chine collé, glued Chinese translucent paper ("White Oak") or conté, graphite, or other dry media, - which together achieve the remarkable depth that characterizes all the drawings.
The last work of this exhibition that Ms. Mitchell introduced was a very large, stunning wall installation (62" high x 67" wide) that featured 24 green metal pieces of roof tiles dating back to the 1800's. She had discovered them in a small railroad town antique shop in Tennessee. The partially rusted, but still beautiful mostly green tiles with their brown edges reflect both vibrancy and decay. Each of these tiles was decorated with a bas relief that appeared to the artist "like a very simple shrine." Lined up in rows of six, they now serve as backdrop to a scattering of tiny oak tree saplings and branches, acorns, and of course different color oak leaves as well as various messages - quotations from so-called "Tree Heroes" - all creatively and artfully affixed to individual tiles. Ms. Mitchell ended her presentation by reading some of those poetic and insightful quotations she had placed on the tiles, lines from Henry David Thoreau or Theodore Roosevelt, from W.S. Graham, Robinson Jeffers, or Gaston Bachelard,while also expanding on the notion of "Tree Heroes." These ranged from Alexander von Humboldt, who as early as the beginning of the 19th century was the first to observe and document the effects of deforestation, to some of today's activist writers such as Jill Jonnes and Andy Lipsis, all of whom she listed as a few of the invaluable resources for this exhibition. In conclusion, on behalf of the Emeritus College I want to thank Ms. Mitchell for her spirited presentation. I am sure that her beautiful and moving drawings about her White Oak, and trees in general, have touched all of us who are concerned about our natural environment. The presentation was followed by enthusiastic applause and of course many questions and comments. Ms. Mitchell's works will be on view again in October at the Circle Gallery of the College of Environment & Design, UGA in Athens. The work of another Emory artist, Diane Kempler, will also be part of that exhibition. The Emeritus College will try to arrange a group visit to the exhibition. --Viola (Tiny) Westbrook
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New Members
New members are the lifeblood of any organization. Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC!
Douglas Eaton, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Physiology
In Transition
H. George E. Hentschel, PhD, Professor of Physics
Melinda Moore Lewis, MD, Associate Professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
Affiliate Members
Martha W Rees, PhD, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Agnes Scott College
My life and work in Mexico, at the national university (UNAM), (Mexico's) Instituto Nacional Indigenista, the Centro de Ecodesarrollo, and the Autonomous Metropolitan University form the basis of my anthropological perspective. Most of my professional production has to do with Mexico--indigenous technology, agricultural evaluation, women's work, and peasant household economy. After I moved back to the US in 1987, I continued my work in Mexico, as a Fulbright scholar, with NSF grants and on sabbaticals, and added migration, worker safety, and health to my research areas as well as work for NIOSH, and as an expert witness for migrants in the US. I was lucky enough to start working at Agnes Scott in 1990, moved to the University of Cincinnati from 2004-2008, but then was returned to Agnes Scott until I retired in 2012. While there, I volunteered with ESOL classes for immigrant employees and helped co-found the public health program and the environmental and sustainability program. I maintain contact with programs, faculty, and students at Agnes Scott. Currently, I am part of a team carrying out the second phase of an evaluation of midwifery in Mexico for the MacArthur Foundation. At the Welte Institute for Oaxacan Studies, Inc. and the Instituto Welte para Estudios Oaxaqueños, A.C. [https://institutowelte.org/], we preserve, present, and disseminate academic work on Oaxaca, Mexico. My current plan is to really retire and enjoy life and politics in Decatur, Georgia.
Isa D. Williams, PhD, Associate Professor Emerita, Agnes Scott College
After completing the PhD at Emory University, I joined the Agnes Scott College faculty as founding director of the Atlanta Semester Program in Women, Leadership, and Social Change and later also served as director of Community-based learning and Partnerships. As a member of the faculty I taught feminist research methods, refugee studies, leadership seminars, and theory/practice courses specific to the Atlanta Semester. My research focused on women's leadership, theory/practice pedagogy, and factors affecting the lives of refugee women and girls in the urban South. My most engaging travel experiences have occurred in the Middle East and countries in Africa. Lasting impressions were forged when I traveled to Durban, South Africa, as a presenter and participant in the United Nations World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia and Other Forms of Intolerance, returning to Atlanta the evening prior to September 11 (9/11). As a retiree, I continue relationships with refugee women and communities, a passion that developed while I was at Agnes Scott. In addition to assisting with teaching English as a foreign language at refugee service centers, I continue to mentor and support refugee women seeking a new life and further education. I have been married to John E. Williams, whom I met during our undergraduate years at Morehouse and Spelman respectively, for nearly 50 years. John holds the Emeritus Professor status at Morehouse, where he retired as Dean of the Business division and taught finance and land economics. He remains engaged with his research ("Economic Base Analysis") and serves on several academic-related boards and editorial staffs, which require his frequent presence in Washington, DC, also the location of our second home. My husband and I have continued our international travel during retirement.
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Howard Kushner February 28 Afternoon Seminar
Creativity, Disability, and the Left Hand
Howard I. Kushner, PhD Nat C. Robertson Distinguished Professor Emeritus Rollins School of Public Health, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education, and Program in Human Health What physical trait is common amongst Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Jimi Hendrix, Barack Obama, and even yes, Kermit the Frog? They are all left handed, or "lefties." In this special mid-week afternoon colloquium entitled "Creativity, Disability, and the Left Hand," Howard Kushner enlightened a packed, standing-room-only audience. Dr. Kushner is the Nat C. Robertson Distinguished Professor of Science and Society Emeritus at Emory University and also the John R. Adams Professor of History Emeritus at San Diego State University. His long-standing interest in studying left handedness is both personal and professional. In terms of the former, he is a self-confessed "lefty," which conferred a distinct advantage in baseball as an adolescent. Also, his mother was left handed, but she was forced to switch to use her right hand. Later on, in his professional work of studies of Tourette syndrome, he was intrigued that many patients exhibited left-handedness. For various reasons, the definition of left-handedness is somewhat difficult and variable, but in the Western world it (however defined) is found in 10-12% of the population. Until fairly recently, "there were no left-handed people in China," but it is now recognized to exist there too. Males are more likely to be affected than females. The presentation covered various historical, conceptual, societal, and medical aspects of left-handedness. Living in a right-handed world is challenging as it impacts negatively on most, but some "lefties" think that it makes them "special." Historically, left-handedness has been viewed negatively. Not surprisingly, some of the linguistic terms for "left" attest to this: sinistra (Italian), gauche (French), levja (Russian), lyft (English-broken), and others. Dr. Kushner mentioned an association of left-handedness with various disorders: Since handedness generally begins in childhood around the age of three, it is not surprising that left-handed children have often been ostracized and forced to "retrain" to being right-handed. Dr. Kushner mentioned various methods to accomplish this: physical restraints (left hand tied behind the back), corporal punishment, (i.e. smacking the hand with a ruler), dunce caps, verbal humiliation, etc. The association with stuttering and left-handedness is intriguing. If a "lefty" is forced to become right-handed, stuttering may develop. Dr. Kushner mentioned the case of King George VI of England and how his stuttering may have been related to being forced to write with his right hand. As a corollary to this, improvement in stuttering has been noted in natural left-handers who were forced into right-handedness, but then retrained back to being left-handed. The presentation included additional intriguing aspects of left-handedness from the perspectives of noted researchers, Cesare Lambroso, Robert Hertz, Abraham Blau, and Norman Geshwind to name a few. More recently, functional imaging studies of the brain have shed new light on the connection of handedness and language centers, but there are still many uncertainties about this connection. Following the presentation, there was a lively question and answer session. For those interested in more information, Dr. Kushner's recent book entitled On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History was recently published by The Johns Hopkins University Press (2017). Interviews with Dr. Kushner can be found on the Internet: Wisconsin Public Radio: https://www.wpr.org/despite-gains-theres-still-lot-we-still-misunderstand-about-left-handedness https://www.wpr.org/listen/1143361 San Diego Public Radio: http://www.kpbs.org/news/2017/sep/26/sdsu-professor-writes-book-history-left-handedness/ --Tony Gal Click here to return to top
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Faculty Activities
David Eltis Professor Emeritus of History EUEC Member David Eltis is co-director of a new project, called "People of the Atlantic Slave Trade" (PAST), that will provide information on any historical figure who can be linked to a slave voyage, enslaved and enslavers alike. This project has been awarded a grant of $300,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and brings together the work of twenty-one scholars whose expertise matches the geographical range of the transatlantic slave trade. An Emory News article on this project can be read by clicking here.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
Did anyone figure out where we would find the lamppost in our last photo? It's located along Clilfton Road in front of the Scarborough Building. Often referred to as Clinic Building A, the Scarborough Building was the original building to house the Emory Clinic and was built with a donation from Robert W. Woodruff. It is named for J. Elliott Scarborough, the first director of the Winship Clinic, appointed in 1937, and later the second director of the Emory Clinic, appointed in 1956.
The plaque on the lamppost reads as follows: 1967 Shining Light Award Dr. J. Elliott Scarborough 1906-1966 Director, Emory University Clinic Physician and Teacher at Emory for 30 Years He Dedicated his Life to the Lifesaving Battle Against Cancer
Atlanta Gas Light Co. WSB Radio
"The Shining Light Award was established in 1963 by Atlanta Gas Light and News/Talk 750 WSB Radio. Each year the award recognizes a Georgian who has been an inspiration to the lives of others through service to humanity. A gas lamp and plaque is installed in their honor at a site of their choice."
 
For our next walk let's look at something a bit closer to home (the EUEC home, that 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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