Sheth Distinguished Lecture -- Monday, April 10, 2023

Hank Klibanoff

Author, Journalist, Professor of Practice, Emory Creative Writing Program

Sheth Distinguished Lecture on Creativity in Later Life*

Hank Klibanoff, a veteran journalist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a Peabody Award-winning podcast host, is a Professor of Practice in Emory's Creative Writing Program. He co-authored The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for history.

Prior to joining Emory, Klibanoff was a reporter and editor for more than 35 years, holding various reporting and editing positions in Mississippi, at The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and serving as a managing editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He has an undergraduate degree in English from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

He directs the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory University (coldcases.emory.edu), for which students examine Georgia's modern civil rights history through the investigation of unsolved and unpunished racially motivated murders. His podcast based on the project, titled "Buried Truths," produced by WABE public radio station, has won Peabody, Robert F. Kennedy, and Edward R. Murrow awards. The fourth season, underway now, relies on personal letters, investigative files, case notes, and legal proceedings to bring to life the unjust murders of two black men killed without legal cause in 1958 Terrell County.

*Made possible by a generous donation from Dr. Jagdish and Mrs. Madhu Sheth



The lecture is offered as a hybrid meeting. If attending in person it will be held in the Miller-Ward Alumni House in the newly renovated and renamed "Alumni Hall." Box lunches will be provided free of charge. If you plan to attend via Zoom, a link will be emailed to all participants before the meeting.



EUEC Faculty Award of Distinction and Distinguished Service Award

Monday, April 24, 2023

EUEC Faculty Award of Distinction and Distinguished Service Award

Monday, April 24, 2023

2:00-4:00pm

This will be a hybrid program

Please join us (In-person or via Zoom), for our annual celebration of EUEC members who will be honored with a Faculty Award of Distinction and Distinguished Service Awards for contributions they have made through scholarly work and service in the years since their retirement.

Also presented at this event will be this year’s recipients of the Heilbrun Fellowships, offered to support emeriti who are continuing research and scholarship in retirement; the grants, administered by the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, are funded by a generous contribution from the family of Professor of Psychology Alfred B. Heilbrun, Jr.

We will also recognize members who have joined the EUEC this year and members whose donations have helped make it possible for our retirement organization to thrive--as it so wonderfully continues to do.

Light refreshments will be served to those who attend in-person.

To register for In-Person, please click here.

To register for Zoom, please click here

Survey Results -- Part 2

This spring we will be adding a member directory, something that has been requested on every member survey since 2007. The creation of an online member directory is made possible thanks to the assistance of one of Jag Sheth’s graduate students. The directory will contain member names, email addresses and the name of the state where they live. Since many members expressed a desire to get together with other members who live in the same region, we are including the name of the state in the directory.

Respondents to the survey also indicated that they would like to get together for a lunch at a local restaurant, meet for a tour of the Carlos Museum, or attend a concert or play with other members of the Emeritus College. If you would like to participate in occasional social events and outings, please consider volunteering for our newly formed Social Committee. Without your help, the Emeritus College will not be able to facilitate the maintenance of social connections within the university, a part of our mission that was neglected out of necessity during the recent pandemic. If you are interested in volunteering for the Social Committee, please contact Dianne Becht or Ann E. Rogers.

OLLI Information

Are you missing the classroom? Yearning to interact with eager students teeming with questions? Then OLLI at Emory (Oshler Institute of Lifelong Learning) might be the outlet you’re looking for. EUEC members will find a classroom full of eager learners primed for thoughtful discussion. 

OLLI offers classes at 2635 Century Pkwy NE, Suite 300 in Decatur, right off the I-85 access road, both in-person and hyperflex with Zoom. Our students range in age from 50s to their 80s. Currently, in-person classroom size is 8-10 on average as we continue to build following the pandemic. Classes are offered on any of 4 days a week. Courses can be scheduled for 4- or 8- week sessions. We also do one-day topics for 60-90 minutes. We’re open to any topic, including a current interest, a dialog on current issues, or one outside your professional area of specialization. How about a new hobby, a recent trip, or a series of book reviews? We’ve had a fascinating course on presidential photographers coincidentally around the time that Pete Souza was scheduled to appear in Atlanta. And right now we’re looking for people who may want to moderate a “Great Decisions” lecture series topic.

I’ve been teaching at OLLI since 2018. I’ve taught courses about understanding “the Black experience”, Caste by Isabelle Wilkerson, a season of plays in Atlanta, and Juneteenth. Currently, I’m offering one on the role of escaping enslaved men and women in their emancipation. I’ve done a couple of one-hour talks on historic African Americans. Basically, if a topic sparks my interest, I start digging. 

OLLI faculty are all unpaid volunteers. One bonus for EUEC members is a $250 stipend for developing a new course. If you’re interested, don’t hesitate to contact Denise Raynor @braynor@emory.edu. And check out our website https://olli.emory.edu to get an idea of current course offerings.

Teaching for Emory’s Osher Lifelong Learning Center by Liza Davis

After 36 years teaching graduate and undergraduate English courses, I retired in 2016 and discovered the joy of offering courses to retirees, most in their 60s, 70s, or 80s, through Emory’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, or OLLI. OLLI offers multiple courses on topics touching on fields as diverse as Technology in the Civil War and Beginning Italian, some in person at the program’s center in Century Center and some online. I’ve taught four OLLI courses, over five sessions, finding a visibly more relaxed audience (as well as liberation from the onerous task of grading papers). Indeed, most of the undergraduates I have taught over my career have been traditional honors students—17-25 years old—with an irresistible buoyancy, freshness, and creativity. But OLLI students have the added advantage of more life experience and a more dearly earned appreciation for literature.

They also laugh at my jokes. Before I retired, I taught seminars on Arthurian literature and film, assigning works such as Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfth-century romance Lancelot, or The Knight of the Cart. Since few of my undergraduates had background in medieval literature, I would open the discussion by explaining the literary significance of the term “romance,” pointing out that the term did not refer to the stuff of the cheap romance novels displayed on the grocery checkout aisle. As you may remember, these romances would typically feature lurid covers with fully clothed men embracing less fully clothed women. (Picture the famous movie poster of Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O’Hara, who is in serious deshabille.) “My husband called these romances ‘bodice rippers,’” I would explain, with a chuckle. Blank looks. I realized that Hollywood gossip magazines had long since replaced those cheap paperbacks at the checkout lane, so my students had no idea what I was referring to. And to my dismay, I could tell several of them were thinking, “What is a bodice??”

When I used the same anecdote to introduce romantic poetry in an OLLI course I taught, it was met immediately with laughter; my OLLI students were old enough to remember those strategically placed paperbacks. When we subsequently discussed John Keats’ ode “To Autumn,” they struggled (understandably) with the poem’s language and imagery, yet they knew exactly what Keats means when, having personified autumn, he asks her, “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too” (lines 12-13). In OLLI classes, we are all in the autumn of our lives, having gleaned and stored thousands of experiences and memories to become who we are.

Perhaps the best part of teaching for OLLI, however, is what I learn from my class preparation and from my students’ comments and questions. They inevitably find nuances I’ve missed in the poetry or fiction we’re discussing. When I taught Natasha Trethewey’s poetry collection Native Guard, for example, my OLLI students shared valuable information about Civil War history and their experience of the Jim Crow South and the Civil Rights Movement, adding resonance to our discussion of the volume’s title poem, “Native Guard.” The Native Guard were those Union regiments created exclusively for Black recruits, many of them slaves who escaped bondage and, like the poem’s idealistic narrator, were eager to fight. But they found they were still victims of prejudice and abuse, some of it deadly. Highly literate, the narrator uses a diary purloined from an abandoned farm to keep a journal of his experiences, creating a palimpsest by turning the diary’s pages sideways to record his thoughts over the former owner’s script. Having felt the impact of living through the 1960s, my OLLI students readily grasped the significance of the palimpsest, a potent symbol of “writing over,” or revising, traditional accounts of Black history and Black experience.



The same held true in my most recent OLLI offering, “Intersections between Literature and Science.” Among other works, we read and discussed excerpts from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. My OLLI students were far better acquainted with the original text than my undergraduates, and they asked more probing, more challenging questions when I lectured on the prominent eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientists and scientific theories that influenced Shelley.



If you’ve neither taken nor taught an OLLI class, consider taking that step; you may gain insights, as I did, into your personal history. Bring your curiosity, your wisdom, and your sense of humor with you, and prepare to enjoy the collective memories of a fascinating group of people.

Lunch Colloquium - Follow-up

The Lunch Colloquium presented by Erin Iglehart and Brian Goebel -- “Microbusinesses Creating Social Vitality in Atlanta’s Underserved Communities," Monday, March 27, was well received and quite informative. Erin Igleheart sent us additional information following the lecture we would like to share with you:

We want to follow up with a few items that we think the Emeritus group may enjoy to support their continued learning and action:

1. Learn more about Prof. Roberts' microbusiness gap research via SSIR Article
2. Shop Start:ME alumni businesses via Shopping Guide
3. Learn more about Business & Society Institute via Impact Report

Please let us know if there’s anything else that you’d like for us to share.

--Erin

Erin Igleheart

Program Director - Start:ME Accelerator

703-217-1820 | erin.igleheart@emory.edu

Faculty Governance News

University Faculty Council Chair Alicia DeNicola welcomed members to the March meeting over Zoom, with the semester’s final meeting to be held in person in April. She introduced Dr. Amir St. Clair, Chief Resilience Officer, who outlined the recovery phase of Emory’s coordinated COVID response. January 2022 marked the start of the 15-month plan for the transition from crisis response to crisis recovery. Policies have been data-driven and based on national and regional benchmarks. Vaccines, having been shown to be effective in reducing the severity of illness but less so in prevention, are strongly recommended but no longer required for most students, faculty, and staff. Masks are encouraged but not required.

Ulemu Luhanga, Faculty Councilor and Chair of the Learning Outcomes Assessment Committee, reported on the work of her group. Ann Rogers, Director of the Emeritus College, outlined the reasoning behind the proposed change in post-retirement titles. Because “Emeritus” and “Emerita” are gendered titles, there is a preference for a gender-neutral term. Some institutions have already begin moving to “Emerit” with the plural “Emerits.”

Ashima Lal, Faculty Councilor and Chair of the Faculty Life Course Committee, reported that in an effort to encourage a sense of community among Emory faculty of the various schools, her committee is revisiting the idea of a Faculty Club, a feature of nearly all our peer institutions. Some Council members remembered how close we were to realizing this goal (due to long-term efforts by EUEC members Mike Kutner and John Bugge) before the dual setbacks of the departure of Provost McBride and the COVID pandemic.

The University Senate also met on Zoom for its March meeting. Senior Vice President for Research Deborah Bruner began the meeting with an update on Emory’s progress toward research funding growth among peer institutions. This year’s NIH ranking of #13, while encouraging, will be a challenge to maintain and surpass. An immediate need to this end is to increase the number of individual PI’s.

Floyd Hall, Interim Director of Science Gallery Atlanta, introduced the mission of the project, located nearby in Kirkwood’s Pullman Yards. Science Gallery Atlanta is part of an international network seeking to connect the broader public with scientific research. Key to the public interface are students in Atlanta’s colleges, universities, and even high schools. These students are trained to act as mediators between the public visitors to the Gallery and the scientific exhibits, explaining the relevant principles and processes.

Carrie Keogh, Chair of the Committee on the Environment (CoE), presented that committee’s response to the PATH project proposed for the sensitive forested areas impacted by recent Dekalb County sewer maintenance. While CoE is sympathetic to some of the goals, such as increased opportunity for bicycle access to cut down car traffic in the Clifton Corridor, members are not convinced of the effectiveness of possible outcomes vs degradation of protected forest land. A motion to ask the Administration for a slowdown allowing for more careful consideration of options and outcomes, with greater transparency to both the Emory community and surrounding neighborhoods, was passed by voting members of the Senate.

Finally, Walter Kolis, Assistant Director of Transportation Services and Chair of the University Senate’s Campus Development Committee, summarized his committee’s activities.

For those wishing more detailed information on either meeting, minutes will be posted and can be accessed with Emory login credentials at:

https://facultycouncil.emory.edu/meetings/2022-2023/index.html

https://www.senate.emory.edu/meetings/2022-2023/index.html

-- Holly York, EUEC Representative to the Faculty Council and University Senate (2021-2024)



Member Activities

Timothy Albrecht

Professor Emeritus of Music

Amazon has just released the third and final entry in my trilogy series exploring the keyboard magic of Johann Sebastian Bach. Like the earlier two volumes that appeared in October 2022 and December 2022, this third book is also a self-publishing venture. It appeared March 22, 2023, and, like its two counterparts, are available through the Amazon website in both paperback and e-reader formats.

Thank you and best wishes from Timothy

New Members

New members are the lifeblood of any organization.

Please make a special effort to welcome them to the EUEC!

George W. Bugg, Jr., MD, MPH

Chief of Neonatology Service, Grady Hospital, Neonatal-Perinatal, Emory

Dr. Bugg is a graduate of Meharry Medical College (MD) and Emory University (MPH). He was appointed to the Pediatrics faculty in 1989. His work as a liaison with the Emory Medical Care Foundation increased collections for Emory and Grady. He worked to reduce infant mortality in Georgia as the Neonatal Director of the Emory Regional Perinatal Center. He also served as the Chief of the Neonatology Service at Grady.

John Bergsagel, Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Emory, Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta

P. Richard Berlin, Associate Professor in the Practice of Organization and Management at Goizueta

John M. DelGaudio, MD, Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Otolarygnology, Head and Neck Surgery

Mikhail Epstein, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature REALC

Suhag H. Parikh, MD, Professor of Pediatrics, Emory, Clinical Director, Pediatric Hematology/Oncology, Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta



In Memoriam

ALI P. CROWN

Founding Director, Center for Women at Emory

1941- February 2023

On December 7, 2011, at Emory’s 175^th Anniversary Celebration, Ali Crown was honored as one of the 175 most significant individuals in the history of the university.

To quote then-President Wagner in his convocation remarks, “We celebrate these men and women because they have incarnated, have brought to manifest reality in their own flesh and blood lives, the qualities that we hope to impart, or to strengthen, by education in a liberal arts university.”

This was an honor richly deserved by the Founding Director of Emory’s Center for Women , an untiring and fierce advocate for all women but most passionately for those who worked and were educated at Emory.

A native of Chicago, Crown returned to school after the age of 40 to earn a degree in religion and psychology at Emory and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She stayed at Emory and became Associate Director for Executive Education and Special Assistant to the dean at Goizueta Business School as well as holding posts in both the law and medical schools.

After two sexual assaults by students on one weekend in the early 1990s Ali was appointed by then- President Jim Laney and Provost Billy Frye , after a national search,as Founding Director of the Emory Women’s Center with the charge to “shape the organization and the ‘culture’ of the center for years to come.”

Ali did just that, by creating a vibrant, responsive ,nurturing and flexible entity which has continued since its inception to adapt to the constantly growing and changing needs of the now formidable population of exceptional Emory women.

Ten years later, in an interview for the Emory Report she said, “If I didn’t know then what I was getting into, I now can locate myself in the truth of the past, not so much in how I’ve  done the shaping, but in how much I’m still discovering and being shaped by the journey.”

Ali observed and listened and paid attention and established a remarkable space in the Emory community for women to step up and step out and take their rightful places in the institution and there is no question that the university is a far better place today for that pioneering infusion of diversity.

In her retirement years she was an active and enthusiastic member of the Emeritus College, notably on the Service Committee, volunteering many hours at MedShare and spearheading the annual Atlanta Food Bank Drive on campus. For her continuing dedication, she received the 2009 Emeritus College Distinguished Service Award.

Ali Crown was a friend, a mentor, a teacher , a sister, a leader and an irreplaceable role model for what a woman ought to be!



Upcoming Events of Interest at Emory

ECMSA: Masterclass with Zhenwei Shi, Viola

Saturday, April 8, 2023

10:00 am

Violist Zhenwei Shi has performed as a soloist and chamber musician at prestigious venues such as Buckingham Palace, Wigmore Hall, Royal Festival Hall and the Shanghai Concert Hall. Since 2018, he has frequently played with the San Francisco Symphony and Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Zhenwei Shi was appointed Principal Viola of the Atlanta Symphony in 2018.

To register for this program, please click here.

Emory Big Band

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

8:00 pm

Free Event/No Tickets Required

Location: Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, Emerson Concert Hall, 1700 North Decatur Road

The Emory Big Band gives students an opportunity to develop their performance skills in a large ensemble setting. Performance literature ranges from traditional big band music to works by many of today’s composers and arrangers. In addition to annual performance, the big band is regularly showcased during the Emory Jazz Festival. 

Recommended Parking: Fishburne Parking Deck or Lowergate South Parking Deck

Contact:  Gary Motley gmotley@emory.edu

Details and other information, as well as additional campus events can be found on the Emory Events Calendar.

If you'd like to share an event/program of interest before the next newsletter (April 5, 2023), please contact Dianne Becht Dianne.becht@emory.edu

The beautiful area pictured on our last walk is Jenkins Courtyard at the Goizueta Business School on the main campus.

The open-air courtyard is a principal link between the business school and the rest of the campus and serves as a welcoming space for visitors and also allows students to eat and study in the courtyard.

The courtyard is named for Howard M. Jenkins, chairman and CEO of Publix Super Markets, Inc. Jenkins is an Emory alumnus and trustee who has donated $3.6 million to the Goizueta Business School. He graduated from Emory in 1975 and has been a member of Emory's Board of Trustees since 1990. Following his graduation from Emory College, he became vice president of research and development at Publix in 1976 and CEO in 1990.



Up next is a look at some of the beautiful Georgian marble used for many of our buildings on campus. This particular building features an array of color in the marble.

Where will you find this on the Emory campus?