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Upcoming Events
Lunch Colloquium TUESDAY March 12, 2019 Liza Davis
VIEW WEBCAST ONLINE
Lunch Colloquium March 12, 2019 Liza Davis
Lunch Colloquium
MONDAY March 25, 2019 Helen and Don O'Shea
VIEW WEBCAST ONLINE Lunch Colloquium March 25, 2019 Helen and Don O'Shea
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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. 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
I know it sounds repetitive, but it is true that we had another great Lunch Colloquium. Ron Gould gave a talk that was both entertaining and instructive and, unlike his scholarly publications, accessible to all of us. Thanks to Len Carlson's report, below, you can read about it. To appreciate all of the puzzles he posed to us, you need to see the recording of his talk, which should be up on our website within the next week. Thanks to Don O'Shea, our videos are now getting some much-needed editing. The recordings of our other Lunch Colloquiums this semester are already posted; you can see them (and previous ones) by going to www.emory.edu/emeritus/programs/videos.
Our next Lunch Colloquium will also be a treat as thanks to Liza Davis we will get to hear about, and hear, some of the poetry of Natasha Trethewey. We also welcome new members, and celebrate the activities of members, including eight of whom were recognized at last month's Feast of Words, for publishing books in the last year. It is also noteworthy that one among us, Dick Hubert, husband of Linda Hubert, was awarded an Emory Medal last week.
Last, but certainly not least, thanks to many of you who have made special gifts in memory of John Bugge. Those gifts currently total more than $20,000 and will substantially increase the amount of research funding we will be able to offer in Bianchi-Bugge Awards in the future.
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.
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Lunch Colloquium--Tuesday, March 12
The Poetry of Natasha Trethewey
The Luce Center Room 130 11:30-1:00
Liza Davis, Director Emerita, University Honors Program, and Professor Emerita of English, Kennesaw State University
Click here to read more below about this Lunch Colloquium
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, February 25
How I Gained an International Reputation as a Gambler
Ronald J. Gould, Goodrich C. White Professor of Mathematics Emeritus
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New Members
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Bianchi-Bugge Excellence Awards
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John Bugge and Gene Bianchi at the 10-year EUEC Celebration
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As announced in the December 17 issue of the newsletter, with Gene Bianchi's enthusiastic agreement, we have decided that any memorial gifts for John will be added to the Bianchi Excellence Fund and that subsequent awards will be Bianchi-Bugge Excellence Awards. We know that John was a great supporter of the campaign that established the Bianchi Excellence Fund that supports Bianchi Excellence Awards. In fact, he asked that several recent contributions to the Emeritus College made in his honor be added to that fund. This will be a very appropriate way of honoring both of our co-founders in perpetuity while emphasizing the central role of the Emeritus College in supporting the continuing life of the mind.
If you would like to make a gift in John's honor, you can send checks to the Emeritus College, designating them in his memory, or alternatively use this link to give online, where you will have an opportunity to designate the gift to the Emeritus College in John's memory. (The address for John's widow, Liza Davis, is 1096 Mason Woods Drive, Atlanta, GA 30329; she will be sent a notice of your gift if you include her address in your online gift.)
Many of you have already made gifts in honor of John. Thanks to your generosity, as of now, over $20,000 has been contributed and this amount will enable significantly higher funds for our excellence awards.
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Faculty Activities
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2019 Emory Medal to Richard Hubert 60L
In an elaborate reception and ceremony on February 28 at the Carter Center, Richard Hubert and David Adelman were presented Emory Medals. The Emory Medal is the highest university award given to alumni. It honors distinguished service to Emory or the Emory Alumni Association, service to the community, or outstanding professional achievement. Dick Hubert is the husband of member Linda Hubert and, as his award states, "for more than half a century he has been a credit to Emory both from his tireless volunteerism and from his philanthropic leadership in the field of global health."
With Hubert at the helm as executor and trustee, the Hubert Foundation has been key in Emory's stake as a leader in global health, establishing the Hubert Department of Global Health at the Rollins School of Public Health, becoming the first named global health department among schools of public health in the United States. The foundation has created endowment funds and fellowships, as well. The O.C. Hubert Fellowships in International Health have enabled more than 700 public health students to engage in research and fieldwork throughout the world, participating in such diverse projects as refugee health surveillance in Belgium, assessing disaster preparedness in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and evaluating interventions for domestic partner abuse in Nepal.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium--Tuesday, March 12
 The Poetry of Natasha Trethewey
Liza Davis, Director Emerita, University Honors Program, and Professor Emerita of English, Kennesaw State UniversityTwice selected as Poet Laureate for the United States, Natasha Trethewey won a Pulitzer Prize for her collection Native Guard in 2007. She later published Thrall, a collection in which she examines the history of men, women, and children marginalized by the rigid hierarchy of pure Spanish and mixed-race classifications in 18th-century colonial Mexico. Various taxonomies of color were captured in what are known as Casta, or "caste," paintings commissioned by wealthy colonial families. Trethewey finds layered meanings in these paintings, enthralling her readers. This presentation will pair selected poems from Thrall with slides of the art they explore. About Liza Davis
Liza received her BA in English from Baylor University in 1974 and MA and PhD in British Romantic literature from Emory in 1980, with special focus on the poetry of William Blake. From 1980 through 1988, she taught undergraduate and graduate English courses at the University of Alabama in Huntsville before marrying Emory professor John Bugge and moving to Atlanta. From 1988, she taught full time at Kennesaw State University, achieving full professorship and appointment as the founding director of KSU's Honors Program in 1995, a position she held until her retirement in December of 2016. She welcomed the first cohort of 25 students into the honors program in Spring 1996 and for many years personally advised every student in the Honors Program and reviewed every honors capstone. She also taught honors seminars and honors English courses. Over the years, she oversaw the growth of the program to include hundreds of students, 100 honors course offerings per year, dedicated honors housing, and the Great Books and PEGS honors cohorts. More than 350 of these students have graduated as Honors Scholars, KSU's highest academic recognition. The Dr. Patricia E. Davis Scholarship, intended for English majors enrolled in the University Honors Program, honors her unwavering commitment to her students and her outstanding leadership in growing the Honors program. Click here to return to top |
Lunch Colloquium--Monday February 25
How I Gained an International Reputation as a Gambler Ronald J. Gould, Goodrich C. White Professor of Mathematics Emeritus On Monday, February 25, Ron Gould, Goodrich C. White Professor of Mathematics Emeritus, presented an informative and entertaining talk entitled "How I gained an International Reputation as a Gambler." Ron began by explaining the origins of this talk. He was bored teaching advanced calculus to students who showed little enthusiasm. Instead he decided to offer a freshman seminar entitled "Mathematics in Sports, Games and Gambling" to students who might be more enthusiastic. The seminar was a success and he offered it many more times. In the talk he gave examples of the problems he asked his students to solve. The audience at the Emeritus College enjoyed trying to solve these as I am sure did his freshmen over the years. The problems also illustrated topics in mathematics. Teaching the seminar also had a further result. Ron became known around the world as an expert on gambling. He learned this when he was approached by people from around the world asking him to share his expertise on gambling. This came after an article in the Emory Wheel that incorrectly said that he talked about how to win at poker in the freshman seminar. This article was posted to the web and spread in unexpected ways. Ron made it clear that he does not have an expertise on how to win at gambling. Further, as he explained to the Dean, he did not promote gambling in the class; he merely discussed the mathematics. After taking his class some students decided they could not beat the odds and would not gamble. Others decided to try, but that was their choice. Some of the emails and calls came from people who appeared to have ties to criminal activities. The first example was an email from Russian television requesting an interview about whether it is possible to win at gambling using mathematics. Another was a call from Bogota, Columbia, asking him to fly there to help set up a casino. The request appeared to come from someone working for a drug cartel. He declined these offers. The audience at the Emeritus College enjoyed the stories and the puzzles he presented, drawn from the freshman seminar. Some of the puzzles used cards. The first example uses three cards. One card is red on both sides, one is blue on both sides, and one is red on one side and blue on the other. A person places the three cards in a hat and asks you to draw one and show it to her. You do and draw a red card. She then offers even money that she can guess the color on the other side of the card. The question is whether this is a fair bet. The answer is no. This can be shown using probability theory. There is a 2/3 chance that the color on the back is the same as the color on the front. Another game involved moving four knights in the corners of a 3x3 chess board. The question is whether the knights can be moved to switch row positions only using legal moves? If it can be done, what is the fewest number of moves that can achieve that result? The answer is yes it can be done. But to find the fewest number of moves (16) requires the use of "graph theory." Ron describes himself as an "extreme graph theorist," and this is a simple example of how to use graph theory. Ron also described his post "retirement" life style. He continues to publish papers on mathematics and travel to conferences to present papers and he also has helped his PhD students finish their theses and land academic jobs. As far as I can tell, the only change from when he was "working" is that he no longer teaches classes or accepts new PhD students to advise. --Len Carlson, Economics
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New Members
New members are the lifeblood of any organization. Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC!
Jonathan Goldberg, PhD, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English
I joined the English department in fall 2006 as Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, after twenty years at The Johns Hopkins University where I was Sir William Osler Professor of English Literature; I also have held professorships at Brown and Duke Universities; I first worked at Temple University where I rose through the ranks and published my first two books, Endlesse Worke (1981) and James I and the Politics of Literature (1983), both focused on English Renaissance literature, the field in which I specialized during my PhD training at Columbia University where I also received an MA as well as my AB degree. At Emory, I particularly valued my participation in the Studies in Sexualities program, which I directed for several years, for its opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange, especially among graduate students. My own work asks theoretical, materialist, and historicist questions with particular attention to questions of race, gender, and sexuality. I have published over a dozen books and have edited several more, including editions of John Milton, Queering the Renaissance (1994), Reclaiming Sodom (1994), and This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature (2016), a collection featuring work by former dissertation students. My early modern focus has expanded to Afro-Caribbean writing (in Tempest in the Caribbean [2004]), a book on the novels of Willa Cather, and film studies. While at Emory I published the Seeds of Things (2009), a study of Lucretian resonances in early modern literature and edited the posthumous work of the eminent theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust (2011; I am her literary executor). For the Arsenal Pulp Queer Film Classics series I wrote a monograph on Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train in 2012. Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility, a book about films by Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alfred Hitchcock and Todd Haynes, and fiction by Patricia Highsmith and Willa Cather, appeared in 2016. This past year, two books appeared (retirement has enabled steady work on my scholarship), Saint Marks: Words, Images, and What Persists (2019) published by Fordham University Press in December 2018 and the monograph Sappho ]fragments published by Punctum Books on December 31 2018. The first of these considers manifestations of St. Mark, while the latter takes the figure of Sappho to explore representations of gender and sexuality from antiquity through early modernity to the writings of Virginia Woolf and the graphic art of Alison Bechdel. When I am not writing, I practice the piano and take daily walks with my life partner Michael Moon (Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) with whom I have been joined for the past 35 years.
Steven Michael Tipton, PhD, C.H. Candler Professor Emeritus of Sociology of Religion
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Faculty Activities
The Feast of Words is an annual celebration of faculty who published books in the previous year. Our members were well represented there: Goldberg, Jonathan (English, emeritus). Saint Marks: Words, Images, and What Persists. Fordham UP. Goldberg, Jonathan (English, emeritus). Sappho: ]fragments. Punctum. Greene, Dana (History, Oxford, emerita). Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War. Oxford UP. Hatcher, Robert (Obstetrics and Gynecology, emeritus), author. Carrie Cwiak, Debbie Kowal, Anita L. Nelson, James Trussell, Patty Cason, Michael S. Policar, Allison B. Edelman, Abigail R. A. Aiken, and Jeanne M. Marrazzo, eds. Contraceptive Technology. 21st Edition. Ardent Media. Makkreel, Rudolf (Philosophy, emeritus). Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics. Paperback Edition. U of Chicago P. Perkowitz, Sidney (Physics, emeritus) and Eddy von Mueller, eds. Frankenstein: How a Monster Became an Icon. Pegasus Books. Schuchard, Ronald (English, emeritus) and John Kelly, eds. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume V: 1908-1910. Oxford UP. Taulbee, James Larry (Political Science, emeritus). War Crimes and Trials: A Primary Source Guide. ABC-CLIO. Tipton, Steven (Theology, emeritus). The Life to Come: Re-creating Retirement. General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, United Methodist Church.
Clark Poling Professor Emeritus of Art History
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André Masson, French, 1896-1987. Combat of Horses, 1929. Pen and ink. Gift in honor of Dr. Clark Poling by the Art History Department Fund, the John Howett Fund, and Museum Purchase. 2006.
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In celebration of the Carlos Museum's centennial, Professor of Art History Emeritus and former Director of the Carlos, Clark Poling, led a "close-looking" seminar on Modernist works in the collection on March 3. There was a wine and cheese reception beforehand, followed by a time to experience works by Klee, Kandinsky, Masson, and others in a small-group setting with one of the people most involved in building the collection.
Dorinda Evans
Professor Emerita of Art History
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Presumed Portrait of George Washington's Cook
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It is probably the case that "Art Historian" and "high drama" are not frequently paired. However, EUEC Member Dorinda Evans was recently featured in a long article in The Philadelphia Enquirer concerning the painting above. The painting, titled "Presumed Portrait of George Washington's Cook" and owned by Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, was thought to be of George Washington's cook and to have been painted by Gilbert Stuart. Dorinda is an expert on Stuart's paintings and was one of the experts who provided convincing evidence that the painting was not of Washington's cook and was not by Stuart. This was a major conclusion, for as the article states "it has been attributed to American master Gilbert Stuart everywhere it has been presented, from its home at a Spanish museum to reproductions at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History, Mount Vernon, and on the covers of several current books. A reproduction also hangs in the Liberty Bell Pavilion at Independence National Historical Park." The complete article that has much more information, including a picture of Dorinda, can be read by clicking here.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
The golden doors from our last walk can be found on the Asa Griggs Candler Library (hospital side). The doors aren't really much to look at otherwise, but when the sun hits them just right, you get a momentary look of grandeur -- what I imagine was felt back in the day when the building was new. The current building is not exactly what it was when it was built. The reading room, in particular, has gone through a major renovation. Click here and here for more information and history.
I recently enjoyed an adventure with one of our Emeritus members, Dr. Herb Benario. He and I visited a building on the main campus. A good part of the building is old, but a large portion is brand new. See if you can figure out where we are.
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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