Newsletter Volume 7 Issue 21 - June 23, 2021 |
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We are also welcoming several new members this month and hope that some of them will soon provide us with a short bio about their career at Emory. Finally, we also note the death of Ron Grapevine, spouse of member Rosemary Magee.
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz and Ann Hartle for help with editing and proofing.
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Lunch Colloquium - Tuesday, June 29
Shauna Bowes
"Looking Under the Tinfoil Hat: The Psychological Correlates of Conspiratorial Ideation"
Please scroll to read more below
Lunch Colloquium - Tuesday, July 6
Susan Allen and Eric Hunter
“A 35-Year History of HIV Research in Africa: Epidemiology, Transmission,
Co-Factors and Vaccine Development”
Please scroll to read more below
Report - Lunch Colloquium - Monday, June 7
Tom Clark
“Are Police Racially Biased in the Decision to Shoot? ”
Please scroll to read more below
Report - Lunch Colloquium - Monday, June 14
Corinne Kratz
"The Porcupine of Time: Managing Multiple Temporalities in Exhibitions"
Please scroll to read more below
Nominations Needed - University Senate and Faculty Council
Please scroll to read more below
Interdisciplinary Seminar 2021
Seminar Coordinator, Marilynne McKay, is looking for topic ideas and participants for Fall Semester
Please scroll to read more below
Faculty Activities
Ron Gould
Please scroll to read more below
New Members
J. Michael Aycock
Cornelius Flowers
Anthony Stringer
William Torres
Please scroll to read more below
In Memoriam
Ron Grapevine
Please scroll to read more below
Walking the Campus with Dianne
Please scroll to read more below
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Lunch Colloquium - Tuesday, June 29, 2021 |
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“Looking Under the Tinfoil Hat: The Psychological Correlates of Conspiratorial Ideation”
Shauna Bowes
PhD Candidate, Clinical Psychology, Graduate Practicum Student,
The Nia Project
Lunch Colloquium - Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
What are the psychological factors that contribute to conspiratorial ideation? This question is at the heart of many studies in psychological science today, understandably so given the spate of recent events indicating that conspiracy belief is arguably more important now than ever. In the research program she undertook as a PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology here at Emory (where she also graduated with highest honors in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology), Shauna Bowes examined the psychological correlates of conspiracy belief in order to better understand why conspiracy theories are universally appealing. She will discuss the arc of the research program, in which she worked closely with Scott Lilienfeld until his death last fall, describing two studies focused on the psychology of conspiratorial ideation. And she will explore the implications of her results and offer insights for future research, as well.
About Shauna Bowes:
Shauna M. Bowes, MA, is a fourth-year doctoral student in the clinical psychology program at Emory University. Shauna earned her bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and behavioral biology from Emory University in 2017.
She worked with the late Dr. Scott Lilienfeld and currently works with Dr. Arber Tasimi. Her principal areas of research are intellectual humility, abnormal and normal personality traits, belief polarization, conspiratorial ideation, rationality, and the implications of cognitive biases for practice, interpersonal dialogue, and belief formation.
Regarding her clinical work, she has trained at the Emory Treatment Resistant Depression Program and the Grady NIA Project. She will start her clinical internship in the Fall of 2021 at the Emory Child and Adolescent Mood Program. Shauna also has a blog series entitled "Don’t Believe Everything You Think" on Psychology Today.
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Lunch Colloquium - Tuesday, July 6, 2021 |
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“A 35-Year History of HIV Research in Africa: Epidemiology, Transmission, Co-Factors and Vaccine Development”
Susan Allen
Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
Eric Hunter
Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
Lunch Colloquium - Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Susan Allen and Eric Hunter, have been “teamed up” not only since they wed, long ago now, but also since they began their work on HIV and other infectious diseases in Africa, long ago as well. She, an MD/MPH epidemiologist and founding director of the Rwanda Zambia Health Research Group (RZHRG) based at Emory, and he, a PhD virologist and immunologist at the Emory Vaccine Center, have spent more than 30 years both conducting research, in the field and in their Emory labs, and helping to implement the results of their research (saving many thousands of lives) at some of the most challenging clinical sites imaginable. The two are in Africa, being menaced by a volcano, even as we post this description of the talk they will offer us when they return. But of course, that volcano may not faze people who had to flee the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 . . . We look forward to hearing Susan and Eric share the exciting story of their intertwined personal and professional lives. As Susan puts it in her most recent email, “science, politics, history, the bigger picture of developments in HIV and other health issues in Africa, and hilarious [as well as harrowing] anecdotes in store.”
About Susan Allen:
Dr. Allen has over 30 years of experience conducting research in Africa. After receiving her Medical Degree from Duke University and a residency in Pathology from the University of California San Francisco, she moved to Rwanda where she established the Projet San Francisco. Since its founding in 1986, PSF has been a leader in epidemiologic and laboratory research and vaccine clinical trials on HIV, sexually transmitted infections, and family planning, in risk groups including heterosexual couples, female sex workers, men who have sex with men, and adolescent girls and young women.
The Rwanda research site has expanded focus beyond sexual and reproductive health to studies of malaria and Ebola. Following the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Dr. Allen moved to Zambia where she founded the Center for Family Health Research in Zambia (CFHRZ). Like the center in Rwanda, CFHRZ has been a leader in research on HIV, STI, and family planning, in risk groups including heterosexual couples and unmarried high-risk women. CFHRZ is currently conducting the first phase 3 HIV vaccine clinical trial to be conducted in Zambia, a multisite study in high-risk women.
About Eric Hunter:
Dr. Hunter has over 30 years of experience in the field of retrovirus molecular biology, with over 200 peer-reviewed publications in the field. His laboratory research currently focuses on the virologic and immunologic correlates of HIV and SIV transmission with a goal of informing vaccine design. The laboratory has been a leading contributor in these areas of research. Dr. Hunter’s recent work has focused on understanding HIV-1 transmission, with an emphasis on the biological and genetic properties of the transmitted founder virus.
His research team has also investigated the impact of the genotype of the transmitted HIV-1 on disease pathogenesis in the newly infected individual. Recent studies have reported evidence for transmission of drug resistance in Zambians and Rwandans attending government health clinics.
Dr. Hunter received his Bachelor of Science in Bacteriology from Birmingham University in England, and a PhD in Tumor Immunology from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund & Brunel University of England. He completed his post-doctoral training in RNA tumor viruses at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
The Rwanda Zambia Health Research Group (RZHRG):
The Rwanda Zambia Health Research Group (RZHRG) is based at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, USA, with research and clinical sites in Rwanda and Zambia. Over 30 years of research have spanned basic science, epidemiology, clinical trials, and implementation projects on a variety of topics including HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, reproductive health and family planning, schistosomiasis, malaria, and Ebola. The group pioneered evidence-based, cost-effective, couples-focused strategies for prevention of HIV and unplanned pregnancy. The multidisciplinary team includes clinicians, epidemiologists, virologists, molecular biologists, data scientists, and project managers.
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Report - Lunch Colloquium - Monday, June 7, 2021 |
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“Are Police Racially Biased in the Decision to Shoot?”
Tom Clark
Charles Howard Candler Professor of Political Science
In his Lunch Colloquium presentation on June 7, Dr. Tom Clark introduced the emeriti to the work of his Politics of Policing Lab, a group that conducts rigorous social science studies of police and policing in the United States. Earlier projects involved Officer Involved Shootings (OIS) and Civilian Fatalities in Los Angeles and Crime After Police Acquisition of Surplus Military Equipment. Ongoing projects include research on Racial Bias and OIS of Civilians and Police Retaliation Following Civilian Violence Against Police Officers.
A major challenge for the group is a dearth of information. Basic information, like how many people die at the hands of the police, can’t be found in a national database. Not only does information go uncollected, often within as well as outside the 18,000 police agencies in this country, but it is often intentionally obfuscated with the agreement of federal agencies through the political influence of powerful law enforcement interests. Dr. Clark’s primary tools are large scale open records requests from individual agencies. The PoPL team has spent many man (and woman) hours requesting information from various jurisdictions and linking to a variety of public sources to fill in holes in the data. They have also culled local news and Google searches to get information on the officers in the kinds of incidents they’re looking into, including the race of both civilians and officers, etc. Frustration with the cumbersome process has driven many a student researcher out of the project.
Racial bias in police use of force, particularly the decision to shoot when officers interact with civilians, was the focus of this presentation. Police are the representatives of government that most people are most likely to interact with. As such, they can be considered “street level bureaucrats.” And interactions with them are unique in that they may escalate into violent confrontations. Police-civilian contact is very common; in 2015, about 53.5 million people over the age of 16 reported contact with police, initiated by the civilians 44% of the time.
While numbers still show that violent interactions are uncommon, the country has become increasingly aware of the use of police violence as a means of social control in minority communities. However, there is some disagreement over empirical evidence of racial bias in police violence. Is the fact that African Americans are more likely to be shot by police attributable to racial bias or other factors? Understanding the answer to this question has larger implications throughout society, in that the criminal justice system interacts with many other systems reflecting racialized social ills, creating widespread social costs and inefficiencies.
There is limited knowledge of the frequency of OIS, fatal and non-fatal, with limited if any monitoring. Private sources, such as the Washington Post, which has a database of fatal police shootings, are woefully inadequate, documenting what is probably only the tip of the iceberg. For instance, non-fatal shootings and civilian deaths with other weapons like vehicles, tasers, and restraint techniques are not being monitored. In addition, barriers to making causal inference from observational data are very high. Because use of force is not random, unmeasurable contextual factors confound the ability to make inferences.
The approach of the PoPL team has been to create a formal model of civilian-officer interactions that isolates incentives and generates predictions about behavior in different settings. The model is then used to identify patterns of behavior that would be consistent with racial bias. They made FOIA requests to 300 cities with a population of 100,000 or more. Using data on OIS from 9 of those cities, they identified and assessed a test to find empirical patterns consistent with racial bias in officers at the point of the decision to shoot. They then estimated the lower bound of the effect of bias on the decision to shoot. They considered one specific mechanism—the ”trigger-happy” cops—but other mechanisms may underlie the bias. Factors considered in the model are all observable characteristics of the civilian and the decision by the civilian(s) and the officer(s) to interact and then whether to escalate into violence. Probability that a civilian dies depends on the behavior of both the civilian and the officer. The core assumption is that civilians are more likely to die when the civilian becomes more aggressive with the officer than in a less high-stakes setting. They defined a racially biased officer as one who perceives the killing of an individual of one race to be “less bad” than the killing of a white one. This concept is analytically analogous to the concept that an officer perceives Black civilians as more threatening than white civilians.
Three propositions were made. 1. Any equilibrium in which officers use force is a mixed-strategy equilibrium in which officers sometimes shoot and civilians sometimes aggress. In a mixed strategy equilibrium, civilians have to avoid aggression enough to keep the officer indifferent toward shooting or not shooting. In real life this means that if a civilian believes the officer is biased, he should be more deferential or compliant, which is proposition 2. This idea is reflected in “the talk” that African American parents have with their children about how to interact with police. Proposition 3 states that differential fatality rates among racial groups arise only when officers are racially biased.
Turning to the results of the study, Dr. Clark reported that one striking feature of the data analyzed is the relatively constant number of shootings seen from 2011-2019. The key expectation, that Black civilians will be more likely to survive shootings than others because they will be more likely to alter their behavior, is confirmed in the results. Blacks are the only group more likely to survive in a shooting compared with white, Latinx, and Asian people. In estimating the size of the causal effect, it seems roughly 3/10 Black civilians would not have been shot had they been white. But again, on the other hand, Black fatality rates are significantly lower than white fatality rates.
Dr. Clark acknowledged that this analysis can’t be generalized beyond the 9 cities studied. These cities are different from others in a number of ways, including the fact that they provided comprehensive and detailed data that they shared more easily than other cities did. In addition, there is significant heterogeneity across different variables within the sample.
It also should be remembered that the PoPL researchers contemplated one mechanism only—“trigger-happy” cops with underlying bias—but that there are probably many other mechanisms in play. The model also implies that white civilians are more likely to escalate contacts with police—although there are other observational studies that confirm this.
The project continues to expand its analysis of the data it is able to collect and to explore other aspects of differential treatment in policing—hoping to provide a nuanced answer to the question so central in political discourse today: “Are police racially biased in the decision to shoot?”
--Denise Raynor
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Report - Lunch Colloquium - Monday, June 14, 2021 |
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"The Porcupine of Time: Managing Multiple Temporalities in Exhibitions"
Corinne Kratz
Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African Studies
On Monday, June 14, Corinne Kratz, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, “Zoomed” in from Santa Fe, where she’s been residing since retirement (and serving as a Research Associate of the Museum of International Folk Art) to present at our Lunch Colloquium on the subject of the work she has long pursued and pursues still—with other presentations in venues all over the world and much publication, too, of course. That subject? Museology. And I was “there” with bells on—or at least with my upper self sufficiently bedecked to allow attendance at a virtual event—there, as I almost always am—as so many of us almost always are—because of the chance to learn. And this time (as, again, almost always) I really had a lot to learn. For one thing, I didn’t even know museology is a field of study. Indeed, I didn’t even know “museology” is a word. And that is not to mention my utter ignorance of the florescence of the field that’s emerged and matured in the last several decades, a version of museology in which Cory Kratz is widely recognized for her expertise: critical museology.
Here is some information on critical museology that I found when browsing online (in Wikipedia) as Cory’s presentation prompted me to do: [forgive the failure to indent the quotation please]
Given that museums are historically linked to colonialism, imperialism, and European missionary work, they have a morally and politically problematic past. While some of the objects museums hold were purchased – though not always fairly and often to the exclusive benefit of the collector – a large proportion of museum collections were taken as spoils of war, or otherwise removed without the consent of the people or community that owned them. Museums, along with their collections – and collectors – played a key role in establishing and reiterating the dominance of colonial Europe and narratives of cultural superiority. Critical museology was developed through questioning the foundational assumptions of museum studies and museums, including their history, architecture, display, programming, and the provenance of their objects. Recent work has also analyzed exhibition design to show how the diverse media combined in exhibitions communicate and shape visitors' interpretations and values. While anthropologists and the field of anthropology were actively engaged in problematic collecting practices for two centuries, anthropologists have also been central to the emergence of critical museology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Cory’s newest publication in the field is among the “[r]ecent work” that “analyze[s] exhibition design”—a chapter in a book called Museum Temporalities: Time, History, and the Future of the Ethnographic Museum that just came out in March. And it was material from this chapter that she shared with us during our Lunch Colloquium, explaining the curious title of the chapter and the talk, “The Porcupine of Time,” by discussing how “exhibits bristle with different times and histories” and how those who design exhibits must take care in the prickly business of “managing multiple temporalities” so as to “mediate” what visitors experience and understand.
I will confess I found much of what Cory had to say quite challenging to start with. Though I have schlepped my way through many museum exhibits in my time—and hope to schlepp my way through many more—I haven’t been at all analytical about the many ways in which the experience I was having had in fact been carefully curated to have the impact and import it did. Cory’s initial review of the numerous factors involved in such curation—factors including not just the aspects of time that were her central subject but also aspects of space and voice (as in the texts that support exhibitions)—was mind-blowing. So many concepts and so much terminology, all so unfamiliar—to me at least.
But then, Cory took us into and through two recent exhibitions, one right here in Atlanta, at the High (the new African art reinstallation), and one in Washington, DC (Americans at the National Museum of the American Indian). As she spoke about the evidence of careful curation in those exhibitions—the handling of time and space and voice—illustrating her comments with slides—it all began to make sense. Even the brief “virtual” visits she was able to offer in this way established the value of the analytical approach to the experience visitors have in each case—and the usefulness of the concepts and terminology she had introduced earlier for the purposes of such analysis.
And yet I should conclude this report on Cory’s presentation with another confession—that although I’m happy to have learned enough to do at least a little analysis of any museum exhibition I attend from now on, I will try very hard to do no analysis at all while I am actually experiencing the exhibition. My decades of aesthetic encounters in a subject area where I can claim expertise, namely, Shakespeare studies, and specifically, the study of the plays in production, has left me convinced that art, in whatever guise—theater, music, dance, and so forth, including anything that might make up a museum exhibition—needs to be experienced with the analytical intelligence turned off. Yes, it is a great pleasure to turn it on again, after the experience is over. It can be a wonderfully illuminating exercise to bring the critical faculties to bear, at that point, and thereby figure out how the art did shape the experience. But I would hate to have that response happening (or trying to happen) simultaneously with the response unmediated by the scholar’s specialized insights.
Where Shakespeare’s plays in production are concerned, I try to model myself-as-audience on the example of Stephen Booth, the Shakespeare scholar known as much for analysis of the plays on the stage as for analysis of the plays on the page. No one wrote more incisive criticism of particular productions. But he thought his way through to those critiques only after he’d immersed himself in a performance as mindlessly as any booby might. I’ll never forget a wonderful story he told a group of us at an NEH Institute in Staunton, Virginia (where there’s a fine theater company doing “original practice” Shakespeare in the Blackfriars Playhouse, a reproduction of the indoor theater used by Shakespeare’s own company). Stephen referenced a time when he’d been visiting London—and saw five different Othellos in one week. And when someone asked if that hadn’t been incredibly tedious, he said: “Tedious? Oh no. Every single time, I found myself thinking, ‘Maybe Desdemona will make it through alive this time.’ And feeling devastated when she didn’t.”
--Gretchen Schulz
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Nominations Needed - University Senate and Faculty Council |
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We need to elect a representative to the University Senate and Faculty Council for a three-year term that begins Fall 2021. The representative from the Emeritus College is expected to attend all meetings and submit a short report for the newsletter after each meeting. Since we are a voting member of the Senate and Faculty Council, it is important that we continue to have representation. To nominate yourself, please email Ann E. Rogers (ann.e.rogers@emory.edu) or the Emeritus College email (emeriti@emory.edu).
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Interdisciplinary Seminar 2021 |
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One of the programs sponsored by the Emeritus College is a yearly semester-long seminar on topics that span multiple fields. In each case, the intellectual enterprise is very much a cooperative venture, with participants drawn from across the rich array of disciplines to be found at a research university—philosophy and radiology, English and biochemistry, French and immunology, geology and nursing—with representatives of each contributing his or her particular expertise to a mutually beneficial learning experience. The overall goal of the seminars initiated by John Bugge is to foster intellectual stimulation and continued growth in the life of the mind in a truly collegial atmosphere. All EUEC members are welcome to participate.
Proposals are open for Fall 2021 when we hope to be returning live to weekly meetings at the Luce Center. We’d like suggestions for a seminar topic broad enough to stimulate the interest of a variety of emeriti, each of whom will propose a set of readings appropriate to an aspect of the topic from his or her disciplinary perspective, and then take responsibility for informally presenting those readings in one of the seminar sessions and leading the lively discussion that will inevitably follow.
In past years we’ve chosen to focus on books of wide-ranging import (Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst); a period of time (“Paradigm shifts in the 20th Century”); and a region of the USA (“The South”). What should be next?
Might Atlanta itself be our focus? I myself confess an interest in “Big Lies and Their Consequences,” a topic that almost every discipline has faced. In 2017 two books addressed America’s fascination with fakery, suspicion, and alternative facts: Fantasyland. How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen and Bunk by Kevin Young, both reviewed by Robert Darnton in NY Review of Books, June 28, 2018. Either of these titles would make for a lively seminar.
Should we perhaps have a look at The 1619 Project and “Critical Race Theory,” topics presently roiling republican legislatures who fear for the nation’s schoolchildren? Or perhaps you’ve come across a good book lately that you think might stimulate discussions with a dozen or so of your emeriti colleagues?
To join the mailing list for discussion of possible topics and further planning, email your name and suggestions to Seminar Coordinator, Marilynne McKay (mmckay@emory.edu). We will schedule the 90-minute Seminar meetings weekly from September to November, and we’d like to have the topic chosen by August 1.
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Ron Gould
Goodrich C. White Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
Round the World Relay in Combinatorics
An international "Round the World Relay in Combinatorics" took place on Tuesday June 8, 2021. There were 22 seminars, hosted by different groups around the world. The day started in Australia at 2am UTC and ended in Alaska at 11pm UTC. Stops along the way included Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Czech Republic, France, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the USA.
Ron's talk was the last one scheduled at 11pm (UTC) / 19:00 (Eastern Daylight Time) from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA site.
Speaker: Ron Gould (Emory)
Title: Chorded cycles
A chord of a cycle is an edge between two vertices of the cycle that is not an edge of the cycle. A cycle in a graph G is said to be chorded if its vertices induce at least one chord, and it is called doubly chorded if its vertices induce two or more chords. The past decade has seen a vast increase in the study of chorded cycles.
In this talk I will survey a variety of results dealing with chorded cycles. I will consider several types of questions dealing with chorded cycles and consider the major known results in each of these areas. This includes minimum degree and degree sum results, forbidden subgraph results, and edge density results. We will ask questions like:` When can an edge be a chord of a cycle and when can an edge be a cycle edge of a chorded cycle? Many times, I will try to place these chorded cycle results in relation to known results on cycles and show that the chorded cycle results are actually natural extensions of known cycle results.
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New members are the lifeblood of any organization.
Please make a special effort to welcome them to the EUEC!
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J. Michael Aycock, PhD, Associate Dean, School of Medicine
Cornelius Flowers, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine - Cardiology; Emory Hillandale Heart & Vascular Center
Dale C. Strasser, MD, Professor Emeritus of Rehabilitation Medicine
Anthony Stringer, PhD, ABPP/CN, Professor Emeritus of Rehabilitation Medicine
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William (Bill) Torres, MD
Professor Emeritus of Radiology and Imaging Sciences
After his residency in Radiology at Emory University, Dr. Torres remained on the faculty in the Emory Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences. He was the Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs for many years and was Associate Chief of Radiology for Emory Healthcare. After decreasing his work effort, he became the Associate Director of Clinical Affairs for the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences. He played an active role in Radiology administration, education, research, and clinical duties. His research focused on gastrointestinal diseases and their diagnoses.
Dr. Torres has been widely published and, although recently retired, is working to influence the future of radiology at Emory and nationally.
In 2003, Dr. Torres participated in the examination of several mummies obtained by the Carlos Museum of Emory University. In the course of the examinations, one of the mummies was discovered to be that of Ramses the First; this mummy was subsequently returned to Egypt by President Jimmy Carter where it resides with others of their dynasty. The CT techniques used during the examination allowed examination of the mummified remains without harming the specimens themselves.
Dr. Torres has also always devoted countless hours to non-profit work through the city with involvement in the Fernbank museum, Hospice Atlanta, the Shephard Center, G-CAPP, Open Hand, the High Museum, and the Carlos Museum of Emory University, just to name a few.
He has been honored by the Nsoro Foundation as King of Starfish Ball. He has also been honored by the TJ Martell Foundation/Winship Cancer Center, the National Black Arts Festival, Modern Luxury's "Leaders in Philanthropy," the Michael C. Carlos Museum, and the Georgia Museum of Art.
Over the past twenty years he has chaired numerous galas in the City of Atlanta and is on the Advisory Board of the Carlos Museum, the board of the Georgia Art Museum of the University of Georgia and the board of Andee's Army, benefiting brain injured children; additionally, he is a trustee of the Gordon T. Little Foundation benefiting the Architectural School at Georgia Tech and the Newton Morris foundation benefiting the Art Museum of the University of Georgia.
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Ron Grapevine, spouse of Rosemary Magee
Ron Grapevine passed away in his sleep in the early morning of June 13, 2021, after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s Disease. Avid runner and computer wizard, Ron made friends wherever he roamed. A night with friends and family at a local pub listening to Irish music was his idea of a great time. Known as Peachtree Ron, he ran the Peachtree Road Race 37 years in a row, and followed up each race with a truck full of craft beer that he shared with friends and fellow runners. Ron could fix any kind of appliance, computer, car, gadget, roof, or electrical device. Neighbors were known to call him in the middle of the night with plumbing issues. He was a dishwasher par excellence and set a high standard at family reunions. Born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1949 to Arvilla Noble Grapevine and Henry M. Grapevine, Ron was raised in central Florida. An Air Force veteran, Ron was stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War (he could even fix airplanes). He studied electrical engineering at the University of Central Florida on the GI bill and then attended Georgia Tech where he received his MSEE in 1980. Ron was at the vanguard of the personal computer revolution and worked at several Atlanta technology companies before turning his basement into a high-tech computer lab. Leading his top-tier executive staff were his cherished children Rebecca and Sean, from a very young age, who were joined by a motley crew of cats and dogs. Entire generations of neighborhood schoolchildren turned to Ron for help with their science projects. He was a fun-loving and devoted husband who encouraged and supported his wife of 45 years at every turn during her multifaceted career at Emory University. She depended on his good cheer, spirit of invention, and zest for life. They traveled far and wide together. Ron was also a dog whisperer. Even after his diagnosis with early onset Alzheimer’s disease, he ran his own “nonprofit” doggy daycare out of the backyard to help neighbors and their pets. As the disease progressed, care workers, too, came under his spell of good cheer. Ron always loved a good (or bad) joke. He was, in short, a force of nature.
Care workers Antina Thorpe, Princess Thomas, Chamus Cooks, Alex Abraham, and Rosemarie Housen, and those at Agape Hospice and The Orchard at Brookhaven are to be commended for their dedication to Ron, his family, and for their fine work. He is survived by his loving wife Rosemary Magee; adoring children Rebecca Rose Magee Grapevine and Sean Patrick Magee Grapevine and daughter-in-law Harvest Grace Bashta Grapevine; his beloved brother Douglas E.
Grapevine; a vast network of extended family and friends; and his rescue dog, Lucky Lacey. In honor of Ron, please help a neighbor or a stranger; run a 10k or walk a dog; hug a family member and a care worker; raise a glass of good cheer.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to Ahimsa House to support foster dogs (ahimsahouse.org), your local pet charity, or the Rose Library (https://rose.library.emory.edu) at Emory University. There will be an informal Celebration of Ron’s amazing life in early July. Keep the party going!
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Walking the Campus with Dianne |
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Our last walk took us to a place many of you know well -- the first floor conference/meeting room at the Luce Center. The room has hosted many of our excellent Emeritus lectures, seminars, and holiday parties. We hope to be meeting again in this space (in person) for the coming Fall Semester. The Luce Center itself is a beautiful building tucked amongst the wooded area behind the Miller-Ward Alumni House on Houston Mill Road. I'm looking forward to getting reacquainted with my office as well as the building, and also hoping to see the deer and various other wildlife who occasionally visit the grounds of the building.
Here's a bit of background information on the Luce Center:
Namesake: Henry Luce Foundation
Date: Construction in 1998
Purpose: Administration
The Henry Luce Foundation underwrote a significant portion of the cost of this building up the hill from the Miller-Ward Alumni House (MWAH).
The building replaced the original Emory headquarters of Scholars Press, a brick Georgian-style building that was later incorporated into MWAH. Scholars Press had outgrown its home. The Luce Center also houses the press's founding organizations, the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, as well as the Emory Emeritus College.
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Where to next?
How about if we visit a place on campus that is a colorful, noisy spot where you can do nothing but have fun.
Note: The photo below was not taken by me, it is a stock photo provided by the place on campus in question.
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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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