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Upcoming Events--
All on Zoom
Lunch Colloquium Eric Goldstein
September 14, 2020
Lunch Colloquium
Carol Worthman
September 21, 2020
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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
This issue is the first of Volume 7, and is the 112th that we have published since July of 2014. Thanks to all of you who have contributed information for it, or have written for it, or have helped edit it. All of the past issues are archived on our website and are a testament to what you are doing!
We had a fantastic talk on Confederate Monuments and Memorials by our own Marilynne McKay on August 31. Marilynne is a dermatologist and so this talk was not in her area of professional expertise, but she ably demonstrated the interdisciplinary capabilities of our members to tackle subjects far afield with a talk that won plaudits from our professional historians. Thanks to John Juricek, you can read about her talk below, and it will soon be on our videos page thanks to Don O'Shea.
We had a great celebration of our annual Sheth Lecture yesterday, with Rosemary Magee presenting, and you can read about that in our next issue. We also have two fascinating talks coming up, with Eric Goldstein next week and Carol Worthman the week after.What a great array of events!
We have been really fortunate this summer to welcome a wonderful array of new members, and we celebrate four more below. Be sure to welcome them when you get a chance. This joy is balanced by the sadness in reporting on the deaths of four of our members. I regret that the news for some has been so delayed, but unfortunately a reliable reporting structure does not exist.
As seen in so many of our Lunch Colloquiums, there is no dearth of teaching among our members. I encourage you who are interested to make use of your talents in teaching for OLLI. Please read the article about that opportunity below. One advantage of OLLI currently being all virtual is that you can teach for OLLI no matter where you live!
I am sure you have heard about the many disastrous attempts of colleges and universities to hold in-person classes and how those plans often had to be abandoned (Whether some of the Georgia system institutions can manage to stay open, given their high number of positive COVID-19 cases, is still to be determined.) It is thus with particular concern that I have been watching to see how Emory's attempt to bring some students onto campus will fare. The answer, so far, seems to be that it is working. There is an entire website devoted to the effort, and a dashboard has been developed to give up-to-date testing results. The dashboard indicates that at least as of this writing, relatively few faculty, staff, and students have been found to be positive (0.20% of faculty and staff and 0.13% of students). It is certainly to be hoped that these numbers will remain low.
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz, Ann Hartle, and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, September 14, 2020
"Where Do Jews Fit in America's World of Difference?"
Location: Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Eric Goldstein,
Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Judith London Evans Director, Tam Institute for Jewish Studies
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, September 21, 2020
"Is There a Mental Health Equivalent of Clean Water?"
Location: Zoom Meeting 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Carol Worthman
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology Emerita
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Lunch Colloquium Report--Monday, August 31, 2020
"MONUMENTAL DECISIONS: The Origins and Messages of Confederate Memorials"
Marilynne McKay,
Professor Emerita of Dermatology, Emory University School of Medicine
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New Members
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We note the deaths of members Dan Mackey, Carlos Rojas, Richard Jackson, and David O'Brien.
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Teach (or Take Courses) at OLLI
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!). 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. EUEC has a history of providing teachers for OLLI, and our home page lists our members who have taught. Currently, Liza Davis is teaching a course on the poetry of Natasha Trethewey and for the next two months Denise Raynor will be teaching "Race or Caste? Parts I and II" and Bill Fletcher (husband of member Dorothy Fletcher) will be teaching "Fabulous Fables From the East: Kalila and Dimna." Denise is now a seasoned instructor at OLLI and she is on the OLLI Curriculum Committee. She sends the following: OLLI is looking for volunteer faculty to teach new courses, all done on Zoom. A course involves a weekly session beginning in the first week of the month and lasts 4 weeks. Sessions can be 60 or 90 minutes. We are interested in a full range of topics including history, science, art, literature, current events, psychology, and sociology to name a few. We also welcome speakers who may want to give a single one-hour presentation. Volunteers are asked to contact Denise Raynor at [email protected] for additional details. We also encourage everyone to take a course and become a member. For a look at upcoming courses, check out our Facebook page or course listings on the OLLI website. Denise Raynor By now, we are all familiar with the disadvantages of not being in in-person classes. However, there are advantages! For one, you don't have to fight Atlanta traffic to get to the OLLI classrooms. Even more importantly, you don't have to live in the metro Atlanta area to be a student or a teacher! You can attend or teach from anywhere in the world. Please do contact Denise if you want more information on teaching or taking OLLI courses.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, September 14, 2020
"Where Do Jews Fit in America's World of Difference?"
Eric Goldstein
Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Judith London Evans Director,
Tam Institute for Jewish Studies
In modern times, Jews have often been hard to categorize according to prevailing definitions of "difference." Before the eighteenth century, Jews were socially, religiously, legally, and culturally distinct from their Christian and Muslim neighbors in Europe and Asia. But when modern concepts of citizenship arose, the nature of Jewish difference came into question: If Jews were French, German, or American, were they now only a religious community, or was there still some ethnic, racial, or national component defining them as a group? The fact that Jews remained "outsiders" in some countries, while becoming "insiders" in others, created additional confusion as to whether they were a disadvantaged minority or part of a privileged majority. In the United States (the focus of this presentation), because power and privilege were shaped by the color line, questions about Jewish status often focused on whether Jews were unambiguously white. Although American Jews were welcomed into the white majority after World War II, the contradictory nature of their group identity has continued to inspire debate, not only about their place in the American world of difference, but also about the very meaning of "difference" in American life.
About Eric Goldstein:
Eric Goldstein, holds a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, which he serves as the Judith London Evans Director. He actually started his studies at Emory years ago, graduating with his BA in 1992 before moving to the University of Michigan for his MA (1994) and PhD (2000). His areas of special expertise are American Jewish history and culture, Jewish history, and American social and cultural history (nineteenth and twentieth centuries). In 2006, Princeton University Press published his first major book, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. More recently, he and Deborah R. Weiner, co-authored a finalist for the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies, On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University Press).
Eric won't be addressing the history of the Jews of Baltimore at today's Lunch Colloquium, but the book is available through Amazon and other vendors, of course, and the info online makes it sound very interesting indeed.
In this comprehensive history of Baltimore's Jewish community, Goldstein and Weiner examine life at both macro- and microcosmic levels, including the everyday lives of families such as the Brunns. Gustav Brunn and his family settled in Baltimore in 1938 after fleeing Nazi Germany. Family legend says that Gustav was fired from McCormick's Spice Company when it was discovered that he was Jewish. However, Gustav went on to create the successful Old Bay spice blend, which the family ultimately sold to McCormick.
The authors propose that Baltimore's unique position occupying the threshold between the North and the South, between agriculture and industry, and between border town and port city shaped Jewish life in distinctive ways. Furthermore, Baltimore's "middleness" created opportunities for immigrants who would later serve as influential government officials, entrepreneurs, and developers.
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Lunch Colloquium--September 21, 2020
"Is There a Mental Health Equivalent of Clean Water?"
Carol Worthman
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology Emerita
The last 150 years have brought tremendous gains in public health and biomedicine that have improved well-being and survival around the globe, yet mental health has lagged behind. While public health advances in sanitation and clean water have improved countless lives, the mental health equivalent of clean water has remained elusive. The present pandemic has revealed fault lines in this and other cultural logics where existing conditions have failed the COVID stress test not just on health but also on economy, education, politics, and environment. Stark differences in morbidity and mortality between and within populations clearly highlight the physical and mental toll of flagrant inequity, systemic discrimination, and marginalizaton. Urgent lessons from the evidence raise a call to seize the opportunity for long-needed change. Carol will unpack the rationale and options for making "no health without mental health" an orienting framework for processes to transform policy, practice, and values, indeed, health science itself.
About Carol Worthman:
Carol Worthman is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Chair of the Emory Department of Anthropology, where she also directs the Laboratory for Comparative Human Biology. Following her undergraduate degree in biology and botany from Pomona College, she earned a PhD in biological anthropology at Harvard, having also studied endocrinology at UC San Diego and neuroscience at MIT. She joined the anthropology faculty at Emory in 1986 and has helped to build its biocultural focus and establish its leadership in the field. Professor Worthman takes a biocultural approach to interdisciplinary research on human development, reproductive ecology, and biocultural bases of mental and physical health. She has conducted cross-cultural ethnographic and biosocial research in twelve countries, including Kenya, Tibet, Nepal, Egypt, Japan, Papua New Guinea, and South Africa, as well as in rural, urban, and semi-urban areas of the United States. For the past 20 years, she has collaborated in the Great Smoky Mountains Study, a longitudinal, population-based epidemiological project in western North Carolina.
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Lunch Colloquium Report--Monday, August 31, 2020
"MONUMENTAL DECISIONS: The Origins and Messages of Confederate Memorials"
Marilynne McKay,
Professor Emerita of Dermatology, Emory University School of Medicine
Marilynne McKay is a dermatologist, not a historian, but she surely is comfortable in her own skin. For nearly two hours (at the Zoom Colloquium on Monday, August 31) she gave a historical talk to a rapt audience on "Monumental Decisions: The Origins and Messages of Confederate Memorials." Her very well researched and illustrated presentation was designed to provide historical context for today's hot conflicts over these monuments.
Altogether there have been more than 1700 Confederate monuments. Marilynne began by asking "What's so offensive?" about them. Her quick answer was "The Confederates on these statues fought to keep slaves. They didn't believe Black lives mattered." She would add (citing David Noel) significant elaborations. The message that the monuments and their creators sent about Blacks went beyond prejudice (negative attitude) and discrimination (unequal treatment). It was racism: "Ideology based on the concept that racial groups form a biogenetic hierarchy." This was not just a Confederate or Southern idea, but was widely held throughout America and Europe in the 19th century and beyond.
In Europe it was used to justify imperialism. In America one of the earliest and most influential purveyors of "scientific racism" was the Philadelphia physician Samuel George Morton. In 1839 Morton published Crania Americana, which purported to scientifically demonstrate a racial hierarchy of intellectual capacity. This was based on his measurements of skull capacities: Whites had the largest brains, Native Americans the next largest. . . and Negroes the smallest.
As Marilynne explained, the movement to memorialize the Confederacy and its heroes began shortly after Appomattox. Southern women organized efforts to recover fallen Confederates from shallow graves, then rebury the remains in honored sections of cemeteries. Soon there were regular women's processionals to adorn these graves with flowers. Sometimes they provided headstones and more impressive memorials. Gradually these ex-Confederate women became more organized and integrated into larger groups. Known as Ladies Memorial Associations, they organized Confederate memorial days and began to celebrate the noble "Lost Cause" with speeches and publications. The scale of what these associations achieved during the postwar era is remarkable. Marilynne observed that the movement was "organized and driven almost entirely by organized womanhood." Apparently more than 260,000 Confederate war dead were reburied. All of these efforts required tireless fund raising, which became a main task of women's associations. Most of them were eventually incorporated into the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894, and still marginally active. Marilynne confided that she is not a member of the UDC, . . . "but my mother was."
Following the war and Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson proved himself a son of the South. In his view, Reconstruction was to be quick and change as little as possible; what to do about the freedmen would be left largely to the ex-Confederate states. What they did was predictable: the Black Codes, legislation designed to push the ex-slaves into a close approximation of slavery. Coercion was used by states and employers to force freedmen to sign annual labor contracts, which opened them to prosecution for vagrancy if they refused. Coercion by the Ku Klux Klan was more direct. During this period white Southerners went beyond racism to embrace "white supremacy." This generally meant that "Whites should have dominance over people of other backgrounds, especially where they may coexist."
The compromise of 1877 in effect ended the Reconstruction Era. The era of "Jim Crow" (a caricature Negro from the popular minstrel shows) followed. The most important action of the era was the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the decision that authorized "separate but equal" facilities, that is, racial segregation. One noteworthy memorial of the era was the Emancipation Memorial of 1876, featuring President Lincoln and a kneeling slave. Funded by ex-slaves, mostly Union veterans, it was dedicated by Frederick Douglass (who later decried its depiction of the slave as kneeling and nearly naked).
As the end of the century approached, white America was at least resigned to the racial situation current then. It seemed that a time for reconciliation had finally come. Union and Confederate veterans began to hold friendly reunions and encampments, trading war stories. The federal government took steps to help maintain Civil War cemeteries, including those of the former Confederacy. In 1900 Congress acted to set aside Section 16 of Arlington Memorial Cemetery for Confederate burials. Marilynne noted that these reconciliation efforts stopped short of including Blacks.
The decades from 1900 to 1920 saw the peak of Confederate monument creation, most promoted by the UDC. The most conspicuous triumph of the movement came in response to the UDC'S petition to President Taft for a Confederate Monument at the Arlington Cemetery. He agreed, and on June 4, 1914 (Jefferson Davis's birthday), an elaborate edifice was dedicated by President Wilson. In 1923 the UDC finally went too far. It proposed, and the U.S. Senate approved, a monument "in memory of the faithful slave mammies of the South." Immediate opposition from the new NAACP and other Black organizations ended this project.
A lesser peak of such monument-building came in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Most conspicuously, in 1955 Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin resolved to revive an old project with a different message. It was to be a giant carving on the face of Stone Mountain that celebrated the Confederacy. Begun in 1923, it had been abandoned since 1928. Governor Griffin bought Stone Mountain for the state for one million dollars. Work was resumed in 1964, and completed in 1972. This grand carving, the largest high relief sculpture in the world, has become a grand problem.
Returning at the end of her presentation to the "What's so offensive" question, Marilynne gave her personal answer: "The soldiers on these statues represent White Supremacy . . . . They should be removed from areas where people of good faith gather." An extremely lively discussion followed.
--John Juricek
For those who would like to pursue this topic further, Marilynne gives us this list of recommended reading:
- Anderson, Carol: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, 287p. Bloomsbury USA, 2017.
- Blight, David W: Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 512p. Belknap Press of Harvard Univ Press, 2001.
- Bloom, Jack M: Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement, 2nd ed, 368p. Indiana Univ Press, 2019.
- Cash, WJ: The Mind of the South, 444p. Vintage Books, Random House, 1941.
- Cox, Karen L, Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, 287p. Univ Press of Florida, 2003.
- Hale, Grace Elizabeth: Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940, 428p. Pantheon Books, NY, 1998.
- Janney, Caroline E: Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause, 304p. Univ of N Carolina Press, 2008.
- Landrieu, Mitch: In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History, 227p. New York: Viking, Penguin Random House LLC; 2018.
- Levinson, Sanford: Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies, 206p. Duke Univ Press, 2018.
- Mills, Cynthia and Pamela H. Simpson: Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, 266p. Univ Tennessee Press, 2003.
- Savage, Kirk: Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, 288p. Princeton Univ Press, 1997.
- Upton, Dell. What Can and Can't Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South, 278p. Yale University Press, 2015.
- Woodward, C Vann: The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 208p. NY, Oxford Univ Press, 1966.
- Southern Poverty Law Center: "Whose Heritage?" https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy#findings
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New Members
New members are the lifeblood of any organization. Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC!
Jim Grimsley, BA, Professor of Practice Emeritus in Creative Writing
Professor Grimsley received his BA from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1978. He was appointed to the Emory faculty in 1999 as Senior Writer in Residence. Professor Grimsley is a master of fantasy, science fiction, literary fiction, and drama. Professor Grimsley received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Achievement in Arts and Letters, the Lambda Literary Award, the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Georgia Author of the Year Award, the George Oppenheimer/Newsday Playwriting Award, and the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Writers Award.
From Professor Grimsley: I am sorry to leave the University at a time of such strife and turmoil, but I know the Emory community will grow out of this hardship into a new strength and vision. We have the kind of community that matters and that will endure. I have been honored to be part of it.
Patricia Marsteller, PhD, Professor of Practice Emerita in Biology
Professor Marsteller received her PhD from the University of Florida in 1985. She was appointed to the Emory faculty in 1990 as Senior Lecturer in Biology and Director of HHMI Initiatives. Professor Marsteller directed the Emory College Center for Science Education from 1997- 2016. Her academic work includes promoting access, interest. and participation in science careers. She has focused on improving science literacy and providing hands-on research for undergraduates and curriculum development experiences for graduate students and faculty. She has developed programs that focus on attracting and retaining underrepresented students, women, and minorities in careers in science. She initiated the Summer Undergraduate Research at Emory (SURE) program in 1990 and the Hughes Undergraduates Excelling in Science (HUES) program in 1995. In the 90s Pat cochaired the student concerns committee, and then chaired the faculty committee, and then was the chair of the Emory President's Commission on the Status of Minorities. She was one of the cofounders of the Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology major and one of the leads on the NSF Center for Behavioral Neuroscience.
She is currently working with the Emory IMSD grant and with several case-based learning consortia. Pat was one of the three cofounders of Emory's IMSD program. Professor Marsteller has a national reputation for faculty development and diversity work. She is currently Chair Emeritus of the AAAS section on education and one of the members of the Committee on Science & Technology Engagement with the Public (CoSTEP). This AAAS board- appointed committee supports AAAS' mission to "advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people." The committee's work aims to support such AAAS strategic goals as enhancing communication among scientists, engineers, and the public; providing a voice for science on societal issues; and increasing public engagement with science and technology. She is co-chair of the Diversity Inclusion Equity and Social Justice working group of the Accelerating Systemic Change Network (ASCN). Professor Marsteller received the George P. Cuttino Award for Excellence in Mentoring, the Delores P. Aldridge Multicultural Award for Mentoring, and the Partners in Education Award for community service.
Professor Marsteller plans to continue her work with BioQUEST and AAAS. She plans to remain involved in Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity programs and faculty development. Pat will be leading several national efforts that focus on Social Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in STEM. She is working with BioQUEST/Qubes on integrating open pedagogy, open education resources and social justice in biology and math curricula. She is working with the national network ASCN leading efforts to change policies and practices at the institutional, faculty and student levels. She continues to work with AAAS education section on similar issues. Recently she facilitated a SCORE reading group on social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion as well as a reading group on Becoming an Antiracist Educator, sponsored by SABER.
Dr. Marsteller wanted us to say that she is proud of Emory faculty, staff, students and administration for their efforts to find ways to help each other in these difficult times of Covid-19! In her 30 years at Emory she states she has been inspired by the creativity and innovation of Emory students, postdocs, faculty, and staff. Emory has become a more just and equitable place because of all the enthusiastic community members. Her fondest hope is that the Emory community continues to create and sustain knowledge and continues to lead the Atlanta community and the world to become more sustainable, more equitable, and more just. She wants you to remember her e-signature: "Anything can be attained if you care more than others think is wise; risk more than others think is safe; dream more than others think is practical and expect more than others think is possible"
And remember to, as John Lewis has said, create good trouble.
Karen D. Scheib, PhD, Professor Emerita of Pastoral Care and Pastoral Theology
Karen Scheib received her BA from Sonoma State University, an MDiv from Pacific School of Religion, and a PhD from Vanderbilt University. The Rev. Dr. Karen D. Scheib taught practical and pastoral theology at Candler from 1998 until her retirement in 2020, and served as director of the school's Women, Theology, and Ministry program for many years. Scheib's research interests include faith and health, theological and cultural dimensions of crises and trauma, and narrative theory and therapy. She is the author of Challenging Invisibility: Practices of Care with Older Women (Chalice Press, 2004), Pastoral Care: Telling the Stories of Our Lives (Abingdon Press, 2016), and Attend to Stories: How to Flourish in Ministry (Wesley's Foundery Books, 2018). In addition, Scheib has contributed to several other books, and written for numerous scholarly and popular publications. Her current writing explores the intersection of ecclesiology and practices of care. She served on the editorial board of Journal of Pastoral Theology from 2003-2005 and as the managing editor from 2005-2008.
A widely sought teacher and presenter, Scheib has been a frequent visiting professor and lecturer at the Methodist Theological University in Seoul, South Korea, Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, and the Methodist University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. She is a member of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Pastoral Theology. At Emory and Candler, Scheib served on numerous university committees and leadership teams, including the University Senate from 2015-2017. She was also the faculty advisor to the Korean graduate student group at Emory for 15 years.
Stephanie L. Sherman, PhD, Professor Emerita of Human Genetics
Stephanie Sherman received her BS from North Carolina State University and her PhD in Human Genetics from Indiana University School of Medicine. Her training was in the area of genetic epidemiology and she has been involved in coordination of multi-site projects to unravel the genetic architecture of complex traits and to understand potential gene-environment interactions. She was involved in research to understand the causes and consequences of trisomy 21, or Down syndrome, and was the co-Director of the Down Syndrome Center at Emory University, a center that combines clinical care, clinical trials and research, and education related to Down syndrome. Her research projects included identifying risk factors associated with chromosome 21 nondisjunction and identifying genes and environmental factors that explain the large variation in severity of Down syndrome-associated conditions, including cognition and behavior. Dr. Sherman's other research program focused on identifying genes that modify the presentation of fragile X-associated disorders, including co-occurring conditions (e.g. seizures) among those with fragile X syndrome, age of onset of fragile X-associated primary ovarian failure (FXPOI) among women with the FMR1 permutation, and age of onset and severity of fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome (FXTAS) among men with the FMR1 permutation. All projects had the goal of identifying perturbed biological pathways for targets of therapeutic interventions.
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Faculty Activities
Bobbi (Barbara A. B.) Patterson
Professor of Pedagogy Emerita in Religion
Bobbi Patterson's book continues to offer opportunities for engagement about its ideas and practices. Her publisher, Routledge, will soon release a new book addressed to physicians and the additional personal stressors they face in a healthcare world with Covid-19. As part of the communication package for that book, Beneath the White Coat: Doctors, Their Minds and Mental Health, by Clare Gerada (psychiatrist), Bobbi has been asked to write a blog related to chapter 7 of her book, which focuses on her work at Grady. In mid-September, she will offer a presentation-discussion on her book via Zoom to students and faculty at Texas Christian University.
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In Memoriam
Dan M. Mackey, MD, Professor Emeritus of Dermatology
Dan Mackey of Atlanta, Georgia, passed away peacefully on Friday, November 8, 2019. Born on December 26, 1936, and raised in Enid, Oklahoma, Dan attended the University of Oklahoma both as an undergraduate and medical student where he was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha honor medical society. He completed his medical education at the University of Virginia, specializing in Dermatology. After finishing his medical training, Dan began a life of world travel with his beloved wife, Sandra, as he took an assignment with the Peace Corps in Borneo providing healthcare for the Iban tribe. Dan's career in Atlanta began at the CDC before he opened his own practice. In 1978-80 and 1982-84, he was the head of the Dermatology department at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Upon his return to Atlanta, Dan worked with the Emory Clinic and was on the Medical School staff at Emory University where he trained dermatology residents.
Carlos Rojas, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Spanish Literature
Carlos Rojas was born on August 12, 1928, and died on February 8 (or 9), 2020. He began his tenure at Emory University in 1960 after receiving his doctorate from the University of Madrid in 1955 and teaching at Rollins College in Florida. He was appointed Charles Howard Candler Professor of Spanish Literature in 1980 and received the University Scholar/Teacher award in 1987 in recognition of his excellence in teaching and in scholarship. He was a recipient in 2001, as Professor Emeritus, of the Arts and Sciences Award of Distinction in acknowledgement of his outstanding contributions to the Emory Community and to the world. Upon his retirement from his 35 years at Emory in the spring of 1996, his colleagues in the Spanish Department presented him with the farewell tribute of a Symposium in Honor of Carlos Rojas, a day-long acknowledgment of his impact upon the world of ideas and creativity.
The academic career of Carlos Rojas was enhanced by his prolific creation of scholarly and fictional works that include his extensive works on various aspects of the Spanish Civil War (a tragic event that confounded his childhood), works on the lives of Dalí and Picasso, and more than twenty novels, as well as innumerable contributions to various media in Spain and the United States and lectures spread across three continents.
Some of Professor Rojas' private papers, donated in 2006, are part of the Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library. The introduction to the Rojas Manuscript collection concludes with the following summary:
"Rojas' work is an impassioned dialog with Spanish history, art, and literature, whose major figures--Cervantes, Charles II the Bewitched, Alfonso XII, Velázquez, Goya, García Lorca, Dalí, Picasso, Unamuno, Azaña, Godoy--protagonize many of his novels. His writing is full of insights on the Spanish conditions. These insights build up from work to work and organize themselves into a generalized vision of Spain that is at once tragic and farcical, exasperated and devoted: passionate, in a word.
"But professor Rojas' books go beyond any narrow engagement with a specific national tradition. His interests are ecumenical, his cultural references broad, and the themes of his novels universal. The rhetorical form of his novels, moreover, while partaking in the great Hispanic tradition of Cervantes, Calderón, Unamuno, and Borges, knows no national boundaries. The ambiguous density of Rojas' novels is due in no small measure to the rhetoric of mirrors, dreams, metafiction, illusion, theatre, and to an unusually rich command of the Spanish language."
Richard T. Jackson, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Surgery
Richard Thomas Jackson, PhD, passed away on August 12, 2020. He was born in Detroit on January 19, 1930. He married Astrid Karen Tindall on May 25, 1956. He was a loving husband and father as well as a world-renowned scientist studying pharmacology and physiology of the special senses--vision, smell, taste, touch, balance, and hearing. As a faculty member of Emory School of Medicine, researcher and teacher, he published over a hundred peer-reviewed articles and served as editor of scientific journals. He did guest professorships in Europe, Scandinavia, Israel, and Japan.
David P. O'Brien III, MD, Professor Emeritus of Urology
David Patrick O'Brien III was born on July 7, 1940, and passed away in the early morning on August 20, 2020, at the age of 80. He attended Atherton High School in Louisville, Kentucky, where he served as the 1958 Senior Class President and as captain of the football and baseball teams. At Princeton, David made lifelong friends and prepared himself for his medical career. He was a proud member of the class of 1962, and served as class president from 2007-2012. After graduating from Princeton, Dr. O'Brien received his medical degree from the University of Kentucky in 1966 and was a lifelong Cats fan. He was deployed to Vietnam in 1968 and served in the U.S. Navy as a Battalion Surgeon for the Third Battalion/Seventh Marines, First Marine Division. He was awarded the Navy-Marine Commendation Medal in 1969 for meritorious service.
After honorably serving in Vietnam, Dr. O'Brien trained in Urology at Emory University, joining the faculty in 1973. He was a founding surgeon of Piedmont Hospital's kidney transplant program and skillfully harvested organs, and performed donor nephrectomies, transplants and complex urologic procedures. During his first year at Piedmont, the total number of renal transplants increased from 45 to 154, indicative of Dr. O'Brien's skill and determination. Among many honors, David received a distinguished alumni award from the Emory University Department of Urology in 2014, and was recognized for his lifetime of accomplishments as a "Pioneer in Transplantation" by the Georgia Transplant Foundation in 2019.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
The staircase we looked at in the last issue can be found in the School of Public Health area between the Henry O. Rollins building and the 1462 Clifton Road building (the old Dental School) (see photos below).
This stairway was NOT user friendly before the bicycle ramp and center handrails were installed. As a cyclist on campus, I had many occasions when I either had to carry my bike up or down that particular flight of stairs, or avoid the area altogether. For pedestrians, those stairs were sometimes a bit intimidating without the center handrail. Huge thanks are in order to whoever was responsible for installing the ramp and rail!! Plus, you have to admit, that bike ramp looks pretty cool.
During this pandemic, I've done a lot less walking on campus, especially indoors, but for our next photo I'm digging through my files to display one I took before Covid-19 changed my accessibility on campus.
The lights seen below, have witnessed wonderful music, many interesting lectures, and even sand mandalas.
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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