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Upcoming Events
November 5, 2018 Lunch Colloquium Ken Carter
November 5, 2018 WEBCAST ONLY Ken Carter
November 19, 2018 Lunch Colloquium Arri Eisen
November 19, 2018 WEBCAST ONLY Arri Eisen
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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 sent our members an email last week informing them of a serious bicycle accident suffered by John Bugge on October 18. John is one of our founders and has been actively engaged ever since, serving as Chair of the Executive Committee since before I became Director. There was no car involved in the accident and it is not clear what caused the accident. He was taken immediately to a Level 1 Trauma Center, where he is still in the Neuro Intensive Care Unit. He has several cervical fractures as well as facial fractures. There was bleeding in the brain and swelling, although that seems to have stabilized. He is breathing on his own now and has a cough reflex when he's aspirated, so these are signs of improvement. He has not yet regained consciousness, however, so his prognosis is still uncertain. We continue to keep both John and his wife Liza Davis in our thoughts and hope for his recovery.
As Gretchen notes in her article about Sheila Cavanagh's Lunch Colloquium last Monday, John was certainly on everyone's mind, but in spite of that we had a great session and learned a lot about crowd sourcing. Who would have thought a lay group could have crowd-sourced an exhibition on The Waste Land? Not only are most of our Lunch Colloquiums web cast, but most are available as recordings on our videos page. Many thanks for this are owed to Don O'Shea who has been a great help in preparing and improving these videos for posting.
We have another fascinating Lunch Colloquium next week on thrill seeking. Ken Carter is an expert in this area and perhaps will help us understand why some people do absolutely crazy things!
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz and Ann Hartle for help with editing and proofing.
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Lunch Colloquium--November 5
Just for the Thrill of It: An Inside Look at Sensation Seeking
The Luce Center Room 130 11:30-1:00
Ken Carter, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology, Oxford College
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Lunch Colloquium--October 22
Crowd-sourcing "Return to The Waste Land": Margate and Coventry in 2018
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New Members
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Faculty Activities
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We have learned of the deaths of EUEC Member Achilla Erdican and Phillip G. Carlson.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium--November 5
Just for the Thrill of It: An Inside Look at Sensation Seeking
Ken Carter, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology, Oxford College
Thrill seekers, people with high-sensation seeking personalities, crave exotic and intense experiences even when physical or social risks are involved. They jump from bridges, run from bulls, and skydive. But sensation seeking is a trait we all have, even if we've never done (or been tempted to do) such wild and crazy things; it includes other versions of the search for complex and new experiences, some involving mental and sensual explorations such as even old folks can enjoy. Ken Carter discusses the psychological factors that shape why thrill seekers of many kinds do the things they do. His book on the topic, Buzz! Understanding Thrill Seekers and the High Sensation Seeking Personality, will be published in the summer of 2019 by Cambridge University Press.
About Ken Carter
Ken Carter, PhD, is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology at Oxford College of Emory University, where he teaches introductory courses in psychology as well as advanced courses in clinical psychopharmacology, research methods, and personality.
Before joining the Oxford College faculty in 1999, Carter served as a senior assistant research scientist in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's prestigious Epidemic Intelligence Service, with a research focus on smoking as a risk marker for suicidal behaviors in adolescents.
Carter has published extensively in both academic and lay publications, actively engaging in the translation of research in psychology into everyday language. His articles have been published in magazines such as Mental Floss and Readers Digest, and he has appeared on news programs such as Connect With Kids and NBC's Today show. He is the co-author of Learn Psychology (Jones and Bartlett), a textbook now in its second edition, and he is currently at work on a textbook on abnormal psychology for Cambridge University Press. He is the designer and instructor of a course on the psychology of thrill seeking now offered by Emory University and Coursera as a MOOC (massive online open course).
The psychology of thrill seeking is the current focus of Carter's research. He has delivered a TEDx talk on sensation seeking and is currently under contract for a book on the subject from Cambridge University Press. Canadian museum Science North opened an exhibit on sensation seeking in spring 2018 that was informed by Carter's work.
A graduate of Oxford College and Emory University, Carter received an MA and PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan. After completion of his doctoral work, he also earned an MS in psychopharmacology from Fairleigh Dickinson University and gained board certification as a clinical psychologist.
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Lunch Colloquium--October 22
Crowd-sourcing "Return to The Waste Land": Margate and Coventry in 2018
On Monday, October 22, much saddened by the news of John Bugge's bad bicycle accident the previous Thursday, members of the Emeritus College and guests gathered to take what solace was possible from the camaraderie that characterizes these occasions--and to enjoy a presentation by John's colleague in English, Professor Sheila Cavanagh. We have benefitted from Sheila's expertise in Shakespeare before--once hearing her speak on the World Shakespeare Project she founded years ago and still heads up (using new technologies that allow real-time interaction between students and faculty world-wide). And we have benefitted from her connections with other experts on Shakespeare, too, as when she agreed to schedule visiting Oxford don Tiffany Stern to offer one of our Lunch Colloquiums during Emory's recent "Year of Shakespeare" programming (2016-2017), planned and conducted under Sheila's aegis. But this time, Sheila's focus was not Shakespeare, but rather a topic related to the further degree she is now pursuing at Georgia State--"public scholarship"--as manifested in the example of a "crowd-sourced" exhibition about T. S. Eliot's composition of The Waste Land.
Sheila recently spent an academic year in England, as the Fulbright/Global Shakespeare Distinguished Chair, teaching and researching at Warwick University and Queen Mary, University of London. She discovered that plans were underway for an exhibition in which the "public" of Margate (where Eliot composed much of the poem many consider THE premier achievement of literary modernism) would "source" or provide the material that would comprise the display. From then on, she was allowed access to information about the long and complicated planning process. And that information gave her special insight into the remarkable strengths of the exhibition when it did open in the Turner Gallery in Margate (a seaside town, southeast of London), running from January through May of this year. (It was offered again in Coventry in September, but has now closed there, as well.)
Of course, Sheila acknowledged that we academics, believers in OUR kind of scholarship, might be as skeptical about so-called "public scholarship" as she was before she began to study the subject (and instances of its realization) seriously. She began her talk about this particular instance of such "scholarship" by placing it in the context of comments from scholars of the NON-public kind, high-powered researchers in many fields who have become believers in the intelligence and, indeed, wisdom at least sometimes evident in "the public." And the particulars she was able to offer about the ways the "public" of Margate, the "crowd" of NON-scholars, did succeed in "sourcing" this exhibition seemed to support this contention. Yes, they (the decidedly motley crew of more than 100 researchers who worked together for a full five years) did have some professional help, from Mike Tooby, an academic who was the "initiating curator," but he was determined that "participatory curation" would characterize the process and its results--and it certainly did.
In reviewing the exhibition for the New York Review of Books, Jenny Uglow wrote: "'Journeys with The Waste Land: A visual response to T.S. Eliot's poem' is a dense and many-layered exhibition--but, then, so is The Waste Land on first reading, with its multiple voices, echoes, and allusions. And the exhibition, like the poem, has a brave experimental energy." Yes, she adds, "There's an air of clutter, of packing too much in." It suffers from "lack of direction." It's a bit of a "jumble." Yet it's an "intriguing jumble." And though some of the art works chosen to illustrate the poem and its times and their impact down through the decades till today seemed like haphazard choices," she found some, in fact many, "fabulously powerful."
Sheila showed us examples of some of the most powerful, works that Uglow described thus:
In Philip Guston's East Coker-Tse (1979), the grimly pink, flayed head of a dying Eliot is strainingly alive. In Cy Twombly's huge, spattered, poetic, and sexy Four Seasons cycle (1993-1994), color sings, Virgil mutters in pencil, blood and nature, myth and gardens meet. That urgency is felt too in R.B. Kitaj's If Not, Not (1975-1976), which refers directly to The Waste Land. The gatehouse of Auschwitz looms over a stagnant pool, a dead landscape, torn books, a broken bust of Matisse, a sacrificial lamb--a shoring-up of fragments: "A heap of broken images, where the sun beats/ And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief." In the corner, a cradled Eliot wears a hearing aid, a poignant reminder of the poem's resonance, its demand to be heard.
Just as haunting, in a quieter way, are three works by David Jones--like whispers echoing through a crowd. One is the frontispiece to In Parenthesis, his great poem about World War I, to which Eliot wrote the preface, with the half-naked soldier, the wire, the rat in the trench, and the men fleeing through the woods. Another is the delicate, tumbling shipboard watercolor of Trystan ac Essyllt (1962), catching the emotional charge of the song Eliot quotes, "Frisch weht der Wind." The third, and most moving, is his graphic Nam Sybillam, made as a birthday present for Eliot in 1958. This incorporates "April is the cruelest month" beside Eliot's epigraph from Petronius, where the Sibyl--doomed after asking Apollo that she may live as many years as there are grains in a handful of dust, but forgetting to demand eternal youth--is withered to nothing, hanging in a jar. When asked what she wants, she replies, "I want to die."
At the end of her review of the exhibition, Uglow said:
The mix of images is memorable and intriguing. I wish there had been more rigor, more steely ruthlessness, to cut out the jumble, as Eliot reduced the long wandering drafts to the glittering compression of the published poem. But "Journeys with 'The Waste Land'" has some enthralling works. I'm glad to have shared that journey--and to have returned to the poem once again.
At the end of Sheila's presentation, those of us lucky enough to have been in attendance felt like we had shared a journey, too--to Margate and Coventry, at least. And perhaps some of us will take up Sheila's challenge to visit (or revisit) The Waste Land itself. We may not be Eliot scholars, but if the British "public" can rise to that challenge, surely we can, too.
--Gretchen Schulz
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New Members
New members are the lifeblood of any organization. Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC!
Micheal W. Giles, PhD, Fuller E. Callaway Professor Emeritus of Political Science
William C. Hutton, DSc, Professor Emeritus of Orthopaedics
Kristin Mann, PhD, Professor Emerita of History
William Size, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences
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Faculty Activities
Corinne A. Kratz
Emory Director, African Critical Inquiry Program
Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African Studies
EUEC Member Cory Kratz has been elected to serve on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association. As part of that service she will also be on the Anthropological Communications Committee.
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In Memoriam
From The Northeast Today (https://thenortheasttoday.com) in India:
TNt Desk | June 8, 2018
Recipient of the Governor's Award in 2011 for distinguished achievement in the field of literature Achilla Imlong Erdican passed away on Thursday. June 7 at around 8 pm at a private hospital in Dimapur after a prolonged illness. She was 89 years old and is survived by her husband Dr. Albert G Erdican.
#1 Born on May 9 1929 to late Imlong Chang and Imcharenla from Sipongsang village in Tuensang district, Imlong Erdican was the first lady to matriculate from the Chang community. She was also the first Chang lady to receive a BA degree in 1955. She received her BA and M.Ed. degrees from Linefield College in Oregon in USA in 1958, besides M. LS from the University of Western Ontario in Ontario, in Canada in 1970.
#2 Imlong Erdican also served the community as general secretary of the Chang Tribal Council during 1947-49, and the government as assistant education officer in the ministry of Education during 1959-60, and as a teacher at Methodist Secondary English School in Malaysia during 1961-63. She was also a special officer for Tuensang Affairs of the government of Nagaland from 1964 to 1969.
#3 She was the first Guides commissioner during 1966-1969, and a member of the Advisory Council of Bhanastali Girls College in Rajasthan from 1967 to 1969. She was a faculty member of the Emory University of Atlanta, USA from 1976 to 2010 and an editor and compiler of the Chang-English, English-Chang Dictionary 2003.
#4 Erdican married Dr. Erdican, an American citizen, on Nov. 25 1970 and returned to Nagaland in 2011 after spending more than 40 years in the United States.
#5 It may be recalled that in 2012 Nagaland Post had widely reported about her contributions to the state government when Achilla donated the largest collection of Naga artifacts, spanning over more than 100 years, brought all the way from the United States with the help of the Arts & Culture department, Nagaland.
May her eternal soul Rest in Peace.
We also received information that Phillip G. Carlson, Professor Emeritus of Business Administration, died on February 27, 2016 at age 93. Unfortunately, we have not been able to locate an obituary for him.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
The pleasant looking but very unassuming building featured in the last issue is the Tufts House. Emeritus member, Donna Brogan, recognized it because she used to work in the building at one time. The Tufts House is located at the somewhat hidden, yet immensely busy intersection of Uppergate Drive, Lowergate Drive, and Ridgewood Drive. I believe the house is now used by the Winship Cancer Institute as a meeting place for support groups. Prior to Winship inhabiting the building, the house had a rather interesting history. Tufts House was designed by architect Henry Hornbostle for Arthur Tufts, the house's first resident. It was completed in 1917 and Arthur Tufts lived there with his wife, Jennie, and three sons, Arthur, Jr., Rutledge, and John, for several years. In 1920, Arthur, Sr. passed away of pneumonia in the Tufts House. After his death, his wife gave birth to a daughter who, sadly, died in the house at only 18 months. Mrs. Tufts moved to a smaller house across the street in 1940 and around this time, Emory University purchased the house, and the Alpha Kappa Kappa medical fraternity moved in to the house. In the years that followed, the house was used for many different departments/organizations, including the Department of Statistics and Biometry, which, I'm assuming, is when Donna Brogan may have worked in the building. Here are a couple of links you can access to obtain more detailed history and information about the house, with the second link, in the spirit of upcoming Halloween, supplying you with "The Haunting of the Tufts House." Since the weather has turned a bit cooler, how about we go inside for our next adventure? We've been inside this building before (hint!). For this visit, I've decided to show you something a bit different....a restroom sink! But not just any sink, one of the most interesting sinks I think I've ever come across in a public space. 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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