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Emeritus Holiday Celebration December 3, 2019 WEBCAST ONLY
Emeritus Holiday Celebration December 3, 2019
Lunch Colloquium
Ruby Lal December 10, 2019
WEBCAST ONLY
Ruby Lal December 10, 2019
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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
Wow! That seems to be the only appropriate response to our Lunch Colloquium last Monday. Several people commented that it was one of the best lectures they had ever heard and when Frans mentioned toward the end of his talk that in the interest of time he was going to skip some of his slides, the audience insisted that they wanted to hear it all. As you know, we ask that anyone planning to attend one of our Lunch Colloquiums register. Because of the limited capacity of our seminar room in the Luce Center, we have to limit registration to 55. Even before I sent a reminder on the Wednesday before the Lunch Colloquium, we realized there was unprecedented demand as there were only a few spaces remaining, and within a few hours after the reminder was sent, a wait list was being generated. Fortunately, Governors' Hall was available, and we were able to schedule the Lunch Colloquium for that venue. Many thanks are due Dianne for her work in rescheduling and planning for that venue and in moving materials to Governors' Hall. We ended up with 88 in the audience, a record for any of our Lunch Colloquiums by far! Thanks to Jan Pratt, you can read below about de Waal's talk if you were not able to attend.
Our semester is not over, and we still have two treats in store. The first is our Holiday Party on the afternoon of December 3 in which we will be treated to a performance of the York Tile-Thatcher's Play, "The Birth of Christ." As mentioned in the notes below, this play is dedicated to the memory and spirit of John Bugge and will be introduced by Liza Davis, with performers Don Saliers, Clark Lemons, and Brenda Bynum. There will also be refreshments. Clearly an event not to be missed!
Our second treat is our last Lunch Colloquium of the semester on December 10. Ruby Lal will share her fascinating account of Nur Jahan. Her book has created a lot of interest worldwide, and we are fortunate to get to hear her at the Luce Center!
The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of Emory (OLLI) is a great resource for the Community and OLLI is particularly interested in having our members teach at OLLI (as well as take OLLI courses!). It is a pleasure to honor two of our members who have taught new courses at OLLI this year. You can read about their courses below and also see information about our EUEC-OLLI Fellowships.
It is always great to welcome new members and celebrate the activities of our members, so don't miss those articles below.
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz, Ann Hartle, and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.
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Holiday Party: Tuesday, December 3, 2:30 - 4:00
Six hundred years ago the citizens of York, England, would flock to the Pageant Green outside the walls of the city in the month of May to watch in wonder as their friends, family, and neighbors would present the entire story of the Bible in a cycle of 48 short plays, starting at dawn and ending as night fell. Craftsmen's Guilds were responsible for the individual performances and on December 3, the Emeritus College meeting room will be the scene of an encore presentation of the York Tile-Thatcher's Play, "The Birth of Christ." Don Saliers, Clark Lemons, and Brenda Bynum will be featured, respectively, as the Angel Gabriel, Joseph, and Mary. Liza Davis will present an introduction to the world and the people of that time and place and what this festival meant to them. This event is fondly dedicated, with deep admiration, to the memory and spirit of John Bugge, who first had the idea to do it.
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Lunch Colloquium--Tuesday, December 10
Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan
The Luce Center Room 130 11:30-1:00
Ruby Lal, Professor of South Asian Studies, Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, November 18
Mama's Last Hug: Animal and Human Emotions
Frans de Waal, C. H. Candler Professor Emeritus of Psychology; Director, Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emeritus; Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Utrecht
Click here to read more below about this Lunch Colloquium
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New Members
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Faculty Activities
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2019 EUEC-OLLI Fellowships Awarded to Clark Poling and Denise Raynor
OLLI is very interested in having EUEC Members teach. As a way of encouraging such participation, EUEC offers fellowships to members who design and teach a new OLLI course. Information on EUEC-OLLI Fellowships can be found by clicking here.
Clark Poling, Professor Emeritus of Art History, is awarded a Fellowship for teaching
"Alberto Giacometti: From Surrealism to Existentialism" in the OLLI Spring 2019 semester.
In his sculpture, painting, drawing, and object-making, Giacometti participated in a sequence of key cultural movements in early to mid-twentieth century Paris. In the twenties, he developed a nearly abstract imagery, in the context of Cubism and Art-Deco. In the early thirties, he joined the Surrealists in their attack on the notion of coherent artistic style, in favor of the creation of idiosyncratic objects evoking dreams and inner realities. From the late thirties through the sixties, he returned to an exacting pursuit of visual sensation, similar in spirit to the motivation of the Impressionists, in works that were seen as manifestations of Existentialism and post-World War II "humanism." We will read texts by the artist and by literary mentors such as the Surrealist leader Andre Breton and the Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre that illuminate Giacometti's art.
Denise Raynor, Professor Emerita of Gynecology and Obstetrics, is awarded a Fellowship for teaching "Let's Talk About So You Want To Talk About Race" in the OLLI Spring 2019 semester. The class will talk about So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo, a great way to explore race. The class provides an open space for honest dialogue about probably the most difficult topic the country faces. The book is required reading. |
OLLI Courses for Winter Term
Registration for the OLLI Winter Term (January 6 - February 24) opened November 18. You can register at olli.emory.edu. The course catalog may be viewed by clicking here.
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We note the death of members Joyce Murray and Raymond Shapira
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium--Tuesday, December 10
Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan
Ruby Lal, Professor of South Asian Studies, Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies
As feminist historian Ruby Lal was growing up in northern India, her mother told her stories of many exemplary woman from the earliest days of the Mughal Empire, women she wrote of in her first big scholarly book, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World. In her second such book she wrote of Indian women of the nineteenth century. But in her third, winner of the 2019 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Biography (and also named a finalist in History for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), Ruby returned to the earlier time to focus on the especially remarkable story of Nur Jahan, the young widow who became the twentieth and favorite wife of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1611. Nur proved an astute politician (as well as a loving spouse), governing alongside her husband and in his stead as his health failed and his attention wandered from matters of state--the only woman ever recognized as Empress in her male-dominated world. How wonderful that Ruby's story-telling skills--skills we will enjoy today--are doing Nur justice after all these years.
About Ruby Lal
Ruby Lal received a BA in History from Lady Shri Ram College, the University of Delhi, an MA and MPhil in History from the University of Delhi, and a DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford. She was an Assistant Professor for three years at The Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Anthropology and History, and since 2005 has been in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory.
Her fields of study include feminist history and theory, and the question of archive as it relates to writing about Islamic societies in the precolonial and colonial world. Her first book, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2005) won much acclaim, including numerous reviews in major international journals and magazines, such as The New York Review of Books, The Economic and Political Weekly, Revue Historique, and The Times Literary Supplement. Her second book, Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013) was reviewed extensively in academic journals and magazines with wider intellectual concerns. Her third book, about which we will hear, has received even more accolades from many sources. She divides her time between Atlanta and Delhi. You can read more about Empress in an Emory News article by clicking here. You can find out more about Ruby on her personal website. Click here to return to top |
Lunch Colloquium--Monday, November 18
Mama's Last Hug: Animal and Human Emotions
Frans de Waal, C. H. Candler Professor Emeritus of Psychology; Director, Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emeritus; Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Utrecht
Attendees at the Emeritus College Colloquium who packed Governors' Hall at the Miller-Ward House on Monday, November 18, were delighted by fellow emeritus Professor Frans de Waal, world famous primatologist and biologist's presentation of his newest book, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves. Professor de Waal explained that Charles Darwin published a book on animal emotions, but his work was largely forgotten for a hundred years as the field came to be dominated by behaviorists. It is only in the last 25 years that scientists such as Professor de Waal have begun to refocus on animal emotions. He pointed out that the general public has always believed that animals have emotions as every dog owner who has witnessed his pet's joy or jealousy can attest. This was dismissed by scientists as anthropomorphism, which attributes human mental states to animals. We know that human animals and those others like apes to whom we are closely genetically related develop similar traits (chimpanzees and bonobos kiss for the same reasons humans do), so Professor de Waal says it is "anthropodenial" to deny that other animals can have human-like mental experiences. Professor de Waal noted that Paul Ekman brought back attention to Darwin's book. He identified 6 basic emotions that are universal: sadness, anger, joy, fear, disgust, and surprise. The human face and the chimp face have the same number of muscles and thus can express the same range of emotion. For example, Professor Jan van Hooff, friend and colleague of Professor de Waal, demonstrated that humans and chimps both smile (which is often a nervous or fearful expression seeking to appease the other) and laugh (which signals that an interaction is playful not aggressive). Chimps (and as we saw also rats!) love to be tickled. So what about emotions other than the basic six: attachment, love, jealousy, grief, and so on. Professor de Waal has concluded that animals have all these emotions. It has been asserted that animals only live in the present. However, Professor de Waal would argue that all social animals react to at least the immediate past as, for example, when they show reconciliation behavior. (This is demonstrated in all animals he studied - except the domestic cat. So your cat does not care that you are angry and does not wish to make up. As the past owner of a wonderful cat I might question that.) It is also argued that only humans show impulse control. Not so. The cat might not wish to be forgiven past sins, but it will wait immobile and silent for quite a long time to catch a mouse. Experiments on small children and on apes show that both can wait up to 15 minutes before giving in to temptation. Behaviorists opposed the idea that chimps can problem solve, but we were shown many examples of chimps evidencing insight and planning. The one that delighted us the most was when 5 gathered in trees with sticks and waited to bring down a drone that was buzzing overhead. As it passed, a well-aimed stick sent it to the ground. Chimps ignore birds, but the drone they did not like. In humans, disgust often has a moral basis. We think particular behavior or a particular person is disgusting. In animals disgust often seems to be related to understanding what they should not eat, though chimps don't like rain and when forced to get wet will put on an expression of disgust that Professor de Waal called a "rain face." Primates clearly have a sense of fairness, too, as demonstrated by the grape-cucumber experiment in which one animal got cucumber as a reward and the other a grape. The one that got the cucumber certainly noticed the disparity! Chimps sometimes will refuse grapes till other chimps get grapes, also. Finally, chimps and bonobos clearly demonstrate empathy defined as sensitivity to the emotions of someone else. A young chimp cries because he has been bitten, and another chimp immediately runs over to hug and console him. This brought us to Mama, a chimp in a Netherlands zoo. She lived to be 59, a great age for a chimpanzee, and despite physical decline remained the dominant female in her troop and central to the life of the colony. When her keepers recognized that she was dying, they put her in a separate cage where Professor van Hooff, who had worked with her in earlier years, visited her. Professor de Waal emphasized that staff, even those who know the animals well, never go into the cages with chimps, but Professor van Hooff took the risk. At first when he knelt next to her and spoke to her, she did not see him, but as she recognized him, she smiled and reached out to hug him. The footage of their "last hug" was so poignant there was barely a dry eye in the room. So tonight when you go home and find your dog has been sleeping on the sofa despite your explicit direction, he really will look and feel guilty when you scold him. Not so your cat. Just go get his dinner and everything will be fine. --Jan Pratt Should you wish to see the footage of Professor van Hooff's visit to Mama, you may do so by clicking here (and it is worth spending the two minutes watching the video if you didn't see it at the Lunch Colloquium!).
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New Members
New members are the lifeblood of any organization. Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC!
Susan A. Safley, PhD, Assistant Professor Emerita of Surgery
I received a BS in Biology from the University of Mississippi (my home state) in 1971, and then became microbiologist for a pathologist in El Dorado, Arkansas, where I was intrigued by the question of why pathogenic bacteria are sensitive or resistant to different antibiotics. This led to a MS degree in Microbiology from the University of Arkansas in 1977, followed by an enjoyable 8 years of teaching biology, microbiology, and other subjects at Southern Arkansas University Tech in Camden, Arkansas. Wanting a new challenge, I came to Emory University in 1985 as a research assistant with John Scott in the Anatomy and Cell Biology Department while applying to the PhD program in Microbiology and Immunology here. I earned my PhD in 1993, working with Kirk Ziegler to identify T cell epitopes of Listeriolysin O, a virulence factor and major antigen of Listeria monocytogenes. During my PhD training, the Wayne Rollins Research Center was constructed and many new, inspiring faculty members joined the department. My first rotation as a graduate student was with a new Assistant Professor, Jerry Boss, who is now the Associate Dean for Basic Research at Emory.
After graduation, I joined Judy Kapp as a postdoctoral fellow in the Emory Ophthalmology Department. During my training with Judy, I began a collaboration with Dr. Collin Weber in the Department of Surgery studying immune responses to encapsulated pancreatic islet xenografts and allografts in diabetic NOD mice, and we have been colleagues ever since. I joined the Department of Surgery in 2001 and have been privileged to extend our work through murine studies to nonhuman primates and the patenting of our double microcapsule, with funding from the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, the NIH, and philanthropic support from donors who believed in our work. Now, as Assistant Professor Emerita, I am continuing to publish our work in professional journals and to serve as consultant to others who are carrying on the studies Dr. Weber and I began. Members in Transition
Kathryn E. Amdur, PhD, Associate Professor of History
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Faculty Activities
Ron Gould
Goodrich C. White Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
Ron has recently returned from giving a series of talks:
Keynote talk, Mississippi Discrete Math Workshop, Oct. 26-27, 2019. Title: The Changing Face of Graph Saturation. Website link: http://msdiscretemath.org/2019/ Invited talk, American Mathematical Society, Southeastern Section Meeting, University of Florida, November 2-3, 2019. Title: On Degree Sums and Vertex Disjoint Cycles. Colloquium, Cal State San Marcos, Nov. 7, 2019. Title: Graph Saturation Problems. Reid Lecture (public lecture), Cal State San Marcos, Nov. 7, 2019. Title: How I gained an International Reputation as a Gambler. Invited lecture, American Math. Society, Western Section Meeting, University of California Riverside, Nov 9-10, 2019. Title: On Degree Sums and Vertex Disjoint Cycles.
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In Memoriam
Joyce P. Murray, EdD, RN, FAAN, Professor Emerita of Nursing
Joyce P. Murray of Lithia Springs, GA, passed away on November 6, 2019 at the age of 76. Dr. Murray received a diploma in Nursing from Warren A. Candler School of Nursing, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Armstrong State College, a Master of Science in Nursing from Medical College of Georgia (now Augusta University), and Doctor of Education from the University of Georgia. She was a tenured Professor of Nursing at Emory University, retiring in 2012. Dr. Murray served as the Director of Ethiopian Public Health Training Initiative for the Carter Center, Director of Accreditation National League for Nursing, co-founder and head of the Nursing Department at Georgia Southern University, and chair of Accreditation for BSN and MSN programs at the National University of Singapore and the University of Sharjah. She was the author and co-author of textbooks and numerous articles in the field of nursing, education and curriculum used world-wide. Dr. Murray was instrumental in developing a new, innovative educational model focused on improving the quality of education for health professionals that has been adopted by numerous nursing schools in the United States and internationally. Dr. Murray worked as a consultant leading workshops for schools of higher education in the United States, Ethiopia, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. She served as a valued mentor to many nurses and educators throughout the world. Dr. Murray was honored as a Fellow of the National League of Nursing (ANEF), inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing (FAAN), recognized as an Honorary Alumni of Georgia Southern University, and received both the Mabel Korsell award from the Georgia Association of Nurse Educators and the Williams Teaching Scholar Award from Emory University. Her complete obituary may be read by clicking here. Raymond Shapira, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry Raymond Shapira died on June 26, 2019. He retired in January 2000. At this point we have no additional information. |
Walking the Campus with Dianne
The symbol discovered on a building during our last walk was found on what is now Convocation Hall (we visited that newly renovated building a few issues ago). It used to be Pitts Theology Library. The Pitts Theology Library was housed in the Old Theology Building from 1916 until 2014. In 1976, the library was named in honor of Margaret Pitts, a longtime and generous patron, and her father, W.I.H. Pitts, who established the foundation that made it possible for his daughter to support the library. Added below is a photo of the building from the front left side -- note the symbol two-thirds up the building over the center window.
 
Let's stay outside and explore the main campus a bit more, shall we? As you can see by all the green leaves, I found this cute little building during a summer walk. If you look closely, you can see the word "Welcome" on the upper window, which might be an obvious clue to where this structure is located.
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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