Newsletter Volume 7 Issue 10 January 20, 2021 |
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“Truth” can also change. We have seen our understanding of COVID-19 and its spread change as more is learned. The wearing of simple facial coverings was initially thought not to be important, but is now understood to be an essential step in preventing COVID-19 spread. With a better understanding of COVID-19 transmission via aerosols, the initial guidelines of maintaining a physical distance of 6 feet are sometimes inadequate, particularly in indoor settings. We know that there is no evidence that vaccines cause autism, but that does not mean that there is no risk to vaccinations in all cases. How do we best communicate the somewhat complicated message that for most vaccines whatever risks exist are far outweighed by the overall public good of vaccination? How do we best transmit “truth” to audiences that seem to have ever shorter attention spans and “don’t do” nuance?
One of the things I so appreciate about my experiences in the Emeritus College is the opportunity to continue to learn and to explore new ways of understanding. I wrote the above paragraphs because I have been so shaken by the insurrection two weeks ago and the events leading up to it. We have heard many people say “That is not who we are” and others reply “That is exactly who we are.” In some strange way our Lunch Colloquium next week fits into the above narrative. Angelika Bammer will talk about her recent book, Born After: Reckoning with the German Past. Arguing that, as William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” she considers the ways that history is transmitted through family memories: the stories we tell and the silences that we carry. How that resonates with seeing images of the confederate flag being carried through the Capitol by the insurrectionists! The next week we get to hear our own John Sitter talking about “What is Climate Fiction Saying? And Should We Listen?” That topic, again, proves to be all too relevant.
Last week Tony Martin provided a great start to this year’s Lunch Colloquiums and gave us a chance to relax a bit from what had previously been some very traumatic days. Thanks to Lee Pasackow and Gretchen Schulz you can read about his talk below, and thanks to Don O’Shea and Stacey Jones the video of his talk is already up on our website.
We were fortunate to hear Polly Price talk to us yesterday about an incredibly important topic in controlling pandemics like COVID-19. What legal controls are available to control pandemics and are they sufficient? A report on her talk will be in the next newsletter.
If you are interested in exploring today’s political landscape through the lens of history, I highly recommend the newsletter “Letters from an American” by Heather Cox Richardson, Professor of History at Boston College. You can read an archive of her newsletter by clicking here. As an academic, she is careful to give sources in her newsletter. Even if you disagree with her analysis, you might find yourself challenged in your understanding of American history.
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.
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Lunch Colloquium - Monday, January 25
Angelika Bammer
“German Family Memory and the Nazi Past: A Reckoning across Generations”
Please scroll to read more below
Lunch Colloquium - Monday, February 1
John Sitter
“What is Climate Fiction Saying? And Should We Listen?”
Please scroll to read more below
Report - Lunch Colloquium - Monday, January 11
Tony Martin
“Tracking the Golden Isles: What Traces Tell us about the Natural and Human Histories of the Georgia Coast”
Please scroll to read more below
Faculty Activities
Ian Crocker and Ron Gould
Please scroll to read more below
Walking the Campus with Dianne
Please scroll to read more below
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Lunch Colloquium - Monday, January 25, 2021 |
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“German Family Memory and the Nazi Past:
A Reckoning across Generations”
Angelika Bammer
Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities,
Department of Comparative Literature
Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Angelika Bammer’s recent book, Born After: Reckoning with the German Past, explores the relationship between history and memory in the wake of a traumatic past. Arguing that, as William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” she considers the ways that history is transmitted through family memories: the stories we tell and the silences that we carry. Drawing on her own family history, she traces the legacy of Nazi history across several generations of a German family to explore the affective impact of this legacy. In response to the question “What do we do with pasts that carry guilt or shame?” she proposes that the shifting ground between remembering, forgetting, and misremembering is the ethical foundation on which we build our lives. Her presentation will interweave a reading of selections from her book with reflections on how and why she wrote it.
About Angelika Bammer:
Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Department of Comparative Literature, Angelika Bammer was trained in the theory and practice of textual analysis with an emphasis on narrative. After studying philology at the University of Heidelberg, she focused on modern literature and cultural production, including film, earning a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Within the broad range of critical theories she brings to bear on her work, she is particularly grounded in feminist, Marxist, Freudian, and post-structuralist critical thought. Professor Bammer has written and published on twentieth-century literature and culture, film and photography, and utopian thought. In recent years her work has focused on two main areas of inquiry: (1) history, memory, and forms of memorialization; (2) methods of scholarly inquiry and forms of scholarly production. Her latest book, Born After: Reckoning with the German Past, is a study of the transmission of history across four generations in form of a personal narrative.
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Lunch Colloquium - Monday, February 1, 2021 |
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“What is Climate Fiction Saying? And Should We Listen?”
John Sitter
Charles Howard Candler Professor of English Emeritus, Emory University, Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature Emeritus, University of Notre Dame
Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Novels about climate and environmental change have emerged in our century as a major part of literary fiction. Both the fact and the prospect of climate change are shaping plots, characters, and innovations of the novels of our time. This emergence of "cli-fi" raises several interesting questions: What motivates climate fiction? How has it changed over the last two decades? How well does it reflect scientific thinking? How do serious novelists, working in a form traditionally well suited to record ordinary life and personal experience, broaden their artistic vision to include planetary time, space, and consciousness? Are dystopias (one strand of cli-fi) inevitably fatalistic or potentially a means of grasping our moment and imagining better futures? What can we learn from climate novels, and eco-fiction broadly, that we might not learn from newspapers and journals and other non-fiction sources?
About John Sitter:
John Sitter earned his BA from Harvard University and his PhD from the University of Minnesota. He taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for 11 years before coming to Emory in 1980 where he was named Dobbs Professor of English in 1985 and Charles Howard Candler Professor of English in 1993 and spent six years as department chair. He left Emory for Notre Dame in 2004 from where he retired as the Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature in 2018, returning to Atlanta in 2019 with his wife, Kate Ravin. Here, he has continued to research, write, and teach (most recently in an ILA course in Foundations of Sustainability, subject matter he often taught at Notre Dame).
As a scholar and teacher, Dr. Sitter has specialized in his longest-term interest, eighteenth-century literature, and contemporary ecological literature and theory, an interest he developed through his participation in the original go-round of Professor Peggy Barlett’s Piedmont Project, and he has taught poetry, satire, and fiction from the Renaissance to the present. He is author of The Poetry of Pope's "Dunciad,” Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, which won the Louis Gottschalk Prize awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Arguments of Augustan Wit, and The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, which was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2011 by Choice magazine. He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry and two volumes of The Dictionary of Literary Biography. Other recent work includes a chapter on poetry from 1740 to 1790 for the revised Cambridge History of English Literature, a chapter on the "poetry of melancholy" for the Blackwell Companion to British Literature, and articles on Samuel Johnson, climate change, and academic responsibility. He received the 2014 Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award given by the College of Arts & Letters at Notre Dame.
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Lunch Colloquium Report - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 |
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“Tracking the Golden Isles: What Traces Tell us about the Natural and Human Histories of the Georgia Coast”
Tony Martin
Professor of Practice, Department of Environmental Sciences
Tony Martin is Professor of Practice in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Emory University. A paleontologist and geologist who specializes in ichnology, the study of modern and ancient traces caused by animal behavior, such as tracks, trails, burrows, and nests, he is the author of two editions of the college textbook Introduction to the Study of Dinosaurs as well as Life Traces of the Georgia Coast (also the title of his blog), Dinosaurs without Bones, and The Evolution Underground.
Professor Martin’s talk at the first of the Lunch Colloquiums scheduled for this spring, on Monday, January 11, followed the outline of his new book, Tracking the Golden Isles, The Natural and Human Histories of the Georgia Coast (UGA, 2020). Amazon describes this collection of essays thus:
Martin invites us to investigate animal and human traces on the Georgia coast and the remarkable stories these traces, both modern and fossil, tell us. Readers . . . learn how these traces enabled geologists to discover that the remains of ancient barrier islands still exist on the lower coastal plain of Georgia, showing the recession of oceans millions of years ago.
The book is in four parts:
· Impressions of the Past
· Shells and Carapaces
· Beaks and Bones
· Humans
Part 1 offers an overview of the “barrier island ecosystems—maritime forests, salt marshes, dunes, beaches—and how these ecosystems are as much a product of plant and animal behavior as they are of geology” (Amazon). Using fascinating slides from many field trips to this area that so many of us know well from our own ventures there, Professor Martin showed us traces of such behavior from the present day, explaining what they show us about their modern makers. And he also explained how comparable fossil traces in the area can document the behavior of plants and animals from millions of years ago, even those that have been long extinct.
In Part 2 of the talk, as in Part 2 of the book, Professor Martin focused on traces of invertebrates, using his slides to illustrate how we, too, might learn to act like ichnologists, noting and interpreting traces easily seen as one walks the sands of the islands, as, for example, the traces left by whelks burrowing in those sands and the dwarf surf clams that burrow around them, all hoping to escape the attentions of shorebirds. He also spoke at some length about the interactions of plants (like spartina grass) and invertebrate animals (like crabs, mussels, and oysters) that have helped to create the tidal marshes of the area—and helped to create them years ago, too—as can, again, be appreciated in fossil remains. Then Part 3 dealt with traces of vertebrates, both modern and ancient, such as alligators and river otters (which, it seems, also leave traces of their presence all over the Emory campus).
In the final section of the talk, Professor Martin turned to the traces of human history along the coast—history that goes back 4500 or perhaps 5000 years. The Native Americans who inhabited the area made shell rings (huge middens of discarded shells) still much in evidence on Sapelo Island and others. During the time of the plantations and slavery, these shell rings were mined and used to make tabby, a type of building material that can still be seen in many structures along the coast. Another source of material used in construction was the stones slave ships used as ballast and dropped at many sites along the coast when they picked up cotton to return to Europe. The stone walks many of us remember seeing in visits to Savannah were made of these stones.
Professor Martin’s discussion of the impacts of human occupation of the area also dealt with the destruction that our kind have caused. The invasive species people have introduced into the area include feral cats, hogs, cattle, and horses. These invasive mammals have changed and are still changing the landscape. Horses on Cumberland have modified the island, eating and trampling the sea oats that stabilize the dunes, causing more and more erosion of the sand. Recently an Emory student mapped the horse trails on Cumberland to show the change over time and the overall ecological impact of their presence on Cumberland Island. Hogs may be the most destructive of these non-native animals because they eat a lot from members of every ecosystem--including the eggs of sea turtles.
Of course, the impact of human presence includes the impact of climate change and, in particular, that of the worsening frequency and power of hurricanes that have washed away sands, uprooted trees, damaged and destroyed homes, and wiped out causeways. Due to climate change, we will see more major impacts from hurricanes and from global warming’s effect on sea level. Sand is washing over salt marshes. And even a one meter rise in sea level, such as is expected by the end of this century, will cause much land now on the islands to be submerged.
In the meantime, for as long as possible, Professor Martin will continue to pursue his own research on these islands—and continue to bring students to the islands to pursue the ins and outs of ichnology (something he can only do virtually at the moment—though, as he noted, at least the current arrangement allows a larger number of students to enroll in his classes than can usually be accommodated).
Emeriti who’d like to know more about this subject area themselves may wish to check out Georgiacoastatlas.org, the product of a partnership between Emory University's Department of Environmental Sciences, Department of History, and Center for Digital Scholarship. The Georgia Coast Atlas project is busy redefining the concept of a traditional atlas, using digital scholarship to explore the ecological and geographic dimensions of the Georgia coast. The atlas combines various forms of digital media with scholarly content to produce a website that should be of great value to educators, conservationists, students, and the general public.
--Lee Pasackow and Gretchen Schulz
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Ian R. Crocker
Vice Chair and Professor Emeritus, Department of Radiation Oncology
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I think everyone can agree that the vaccine roll-out in the US and the State of Georgia has been disappointingly slow. This is occurring during a time of the worst surge in cases here in Georgia and elsewhere in the US. Given that vaccination clinics are likely to draw away healthcare personnel from their patient care duties in the hospital, I have made an effort to get involved in the vaccination effort. I contacted one of my former colleagues at Emory Healthcare and signed up to be an inoculator at a half dozen of their vaccine clinics. I also reached out to the Fulton County Board of Health (FCBOH) and am signed up with them as well.
I did my first clinic with Emory and was super impressed by how well it was run. We had 20 inoculators who had a scribe/assistant assigned to them. In the background were administrative personnel verifying appointments, greeters, medical personnel monitoring patients after their injections and pharmacy techs preparing the syringes. Almost all of the personnel present were Emory Healthcare employees. In 4 hours I treated about 40 patients and could easily have treated more. Not sure how many got treated that day, but I heard that they had treated 2000+ the day before. Went home feeling proud, feeling that I was making a difference.
On the other hand when I had my first shot through FCBOH they only had 4 people administering the vaccine and no scribes to support them. I estimated that they were only injecting about 4 patients/hour. I don’t say this to shame the FCBOH. Only to say that their need for volunteers is much greater than Emory’s. If you wish to volunteer for your local BOH you need to sign up with https://www.servga.gov. I would encourage all retired nurses and MDs to get involved.
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Ron Gould
Goodrich C. White Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
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Ron gave a talk last week on "Extensions Under Edge Density Conditions" at the online SECANT III Conference hosted at Cedar Crest College.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne |
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The greenery from our last walk is a piece of hidden creativity on campus. The shoe vines can be found in the small courtyard area at the Visual Arts Building, 700 Peavine Creek Drive. I couldn't find a plaque/sign to credit the artist, but I do want to commend the person responsible for this interesting piece. From afar, they do look like some sort of plant vines, but as you get closer you realize they are shoes! And shoes of all kinds - I discovered one that looked very much like a shoe from the 1930s. I'm not sure how long this piece will be displayed, but if you are in that area anytime soon, be sure to take a look. I've supplied two more photos to give you a better view of their location. |
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Back to my photo stash for this next walk.
Okay, I know this is a restroom, but the floor....well, you have to admit, it is interesting and quite artistic. And yes, it is a women's restroom, but I do believe the men's room in this building has the same floor.
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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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