LSU'S Biweekly Newsletter for Faculty & Staff
May 5, 2006 |
VOL. 22, NO. 17 |
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| LSU has chosen the book “Life on the Color Line” for its Summer Reading Program. |
LSU’s Summer Reading Program Book Selection Committee has chosen the national bestseller “Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered he was Black” as its choice for incoming freshmen to read and discuss.
This year, LSU has expanded the program to include the Baton Rouge community, and is working with several community partners to encourage everyone in the city to read the book. This concept of “one book, one community,” has been successful in major cities across the nation, but has not yet been tried in Baton Rouge.
LSU will bring the author, Gregory Howard Williams, to campus to speak to students during Academic Convocation on Friday, Aug. 25, and will work with Forum 35, the YWCA, Southern University, the East Baton Rouge Parish Library and Cox Communications to have Williams speak to the Baton Rouge community on Thursday, Aug. 24. The community event will be televised by Cox Channel 4 to help ensure that everyone who wants to read the book will also have a chance to hear the author speak.
In the book, Williams, who is currently the president of The City College of New York, tells the captivating story of his childhood in segregated Virginia in the 1950s. He grew up believing he was white until the family business failed and his parents’ marriage fell apart. Then, Williams, his younger brother and their father moved to Indiana to be with relatives, and Williams learned that his dark-skinned father, who had been passing for Italian-American, was actually half black. This powerful memoir recounts the struggles that Williams had with his identity, as well as the difficulties and triumphs that he experienced with people of both races.
The Summer Reading Program Book Selection Committee is composed of students, faculty and staff. The committee chose “Life on the Color Line” for its focus on racial identity and acceptance, and because it demonstrates how one person’s determination and spirit – with the help of a few key people – can overcome such serious obstacles as racial conflict, family dysfunction, poverty and alcoholism. The book also touches on subjects such as foster parenting, mentoring, decision making, problem-solving skills, school successes and failures, and the role of athletics in a young person’s life.
The committee also felt that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita brought new insight to the social issues in Louisiana. The committee believes it is essential to address and understand these issues in order to successfully rebuild Louisiana.
“Life on the Color Line” won the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was named an “Out-standing Book on the Subject of Human Rights” in 1996 by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America.
LSU’s Summer Reading Program is a means of introducing entering freshmen to the academic and intellectual culture of the university through a common reading experience. Freshmen entering LSU in the fall semester are asked to read the assigned book, to attend Academic Convocation and to participate in small discussion sessions about the book with faculty members. In addition, many professors will include discussions about the book in their freshman-level classes.
“The Summer Reading Program is a wonderful way to acclimate new students to the university, to give them a shared experience and to show them how one idea or concept can be applied to many different disciplines,” said LSU Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Risa Palm. “And by bringing this experience to the community at large, we are strengthening the ties between LSU and Baton Rouge, and bringing the university’s mission of service to the public.”
The university is also planning to incorporate race-related programs and speakers into the university’s activities for the fall semester, in order to keep the book – and the issues it addresses – top of mind for faculty, staff and students. By including the Baton Rouge community in this year’s Summer Reading Program, LSU hopes to bring the city’s residents together in the same way.
LSU is one of more than 30 universities that start their academic year with a program surrounding a summer reading assignment. LSU began the program two years ago, when the freshman class read “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.” Last year, students read “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World.”
Gregory Howard Williams is the 11th president of The City College of New York. He holds five degrees, including a juris doctorate and a doctorate from George Washington University, and also holds three honorary doctorates. He has been a university administrator for more than 30 years, and has published three books and a number of articles and book reviews for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. As a result of “Life on the Color Line,” he has been featured on Oprah, Dateline NBC, Larry King Live and several other national shows.
For more information, visit the LSU Summer Reading Program’s Web site at www.lsu.edu/srp. The “One Book, One Community” Web site, www.lsu.edu/onebook, will soon go live. The sites will include a discussion guide for the book that can be used by both LSU students and local community members.
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| Queen Laurita Rita Barras, of Wild Magnolias in 2002, is pictured above in full costume. The photo, taken by J. Nash Porter, serves as the exhibit’s signature piece. |
For more than 12 years, LSU Associate Professor of Geography & Anthropology Joyce Marie Jackson has studied the unique folk ritual of the New Orleans Black Mardi Gras Indians, while her husband, Baton Rouge-based documentary photographer J. Nash Porter, has chronicled this group in photographs for 35 years.
Now, due to the diaspora caused by Hurricane Katrina, the West African- and Caribbean-inspired tradition indigenous to New Orleans is endangered. Last year, nearly 30 tribes in New Orleans practiced the custom of elaborately costuming and parading on foot throughout the city’s neighborhoods during Mardi Gras and on other special days of the year. This year, only half of the tribes paraded for Mardi Gras and not all of them “suited up,” Jackson said.
However, Jackson and Porter hope an exhibit they have co-curated with the Smithsonian Institute’s Anacostia Museum & Center for African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., will enlighten a national audience about this century-old tradition.
“The New Orleans Black Mardi Gras Indians: Exploring a Community Tradition from an Insider’s View” exhibit is on display now through Sunday, Aug. 27, at the museum. The core of the exhibit is based on Porter’s 60 color images chronicling the Black Indian tradition. Jackson wrote the narrative script for the exhibit, which is based on her years of ethnographic and historical research on this cultural tradition. The exhibit also includes four traditional Mardi Gras Indian costumes, two of which are from the Anacostia Museum’s “The Collection of Herreast J. Harrison and Family.” Another suit is that of a child’s costume, made for 6-year old Lil’ Squaw Diamond Clay of the Creole Wild West by her uncle Irvin “Honey” Bannister, Gang flag of the tribe. The suit was retrieved from the mud after Hurricane Katrina. Chief Derrick Hulin of the Golden Blades tribe also loaned one of his suits for the exhibit.
Other features of the exhibit include two video clips. The first clip is from WDSU-TV New Orleans footage of the March 2, 2006, “Remembering Big Chief Tootie Montana.” The second is from the National Black Programming Consortium, “Mardi Gras 2006: Walking to New Orleans.” “The exhibition is more than visual images that express the aesthetic and creative eye of the photographer. The images also showcase many wonderful unsung New Orleans artists,” Porter said.
“The exhibition is also about families, intergenerational traditions, resistance street theater and community,” Jackson added.
The couple said that in light of the many post-Katrina negative images of New Orleans, they hope their exhibition will leave visitors with positive impressions of New Orleans’ people and culture.
In concert with the exhibition, the museum is offering a variety of public programs.
For more information on the programs, visit the museum’s Web site, http://anacostia.si.edu/.
On Monday, April 17, Claudia Emerson was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her book “Late Wife: Poems,” published by LSU Press in September 2005. The prize honors a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author and carries a $10,000 honorarium.
This is the fourth Pulitzer Prize for an LSU Press book and the third in poetry. Previous winners include Henry Taylor’s “The Flying Change,” Lisel Mueller’s “Alive Together” and John Kennedy Toole’s novel “A Confederacy of Dunces.”
“We’re thrilled,” said LSU Press Director Mary Katherine Callaway. “The press has been proud to publish Claudia Emerson’s work over the past decade, and we have always believed her writing to be among the best in poetry today. To see her get this kind of national recognition is truly rewarding.”
In “Late Wife,” a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how the speaker’s re-beginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples’ respective losses.
The most personal of Emerson’s poetry collections, “Late Wife” is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past. The book was published in LSU Press’ Southern Messenger Poets series, edited by Dave Smith.
Emerson is an associate professor of English at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Va. She is also the author of the poetry books “Pharaoh, Pharaoh and Pinion: An Elegy.” Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, New England Review and other journals. The recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, she lives in Fredericksburg.
At its April meeting, the LSU Board of Supervisors approved the following:
It is hard to imagine what possible characteristics the human eye and a star in space could share besides being round or that researchers of the two objects could find enough in common to collaborate on their work. But, researchers at LSU’s Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, say there is much in common and much to be gained from collaboration among four new associate faculty appointments the center has announced.
Among the new associate faculty researchers are Sumanta Acharya, the L.R. Daniel Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Joel Tohline, LSU Alumni Professor of Physics; Robert Twilley, professor and director of the LSU Wetland Biogeochemistry Institute; and Christopher White, the Chevron Associate Professor of Petroleum Engineering. The concurrent appointments were made in a hope to create a synergy among researchers that could lead to quicker advances in a multitude of areas. Their research will include everything from understanding the complex structure of the eye and the inner workings of stellar objects, to better protecting our coast and understanding oil and gas movement underground for more efficient, cleaner production.
“ The appointment of these four researchers will allow them to use the computational know-how available at CCT to model and test their research problems as they reach out to other faculty across campus by sharing what they’ve learned in their particular research and methods,” said Jorge Pullin, the Horace Hearne Chair in Theoretical Physics and lead in CCT’s Coast to Cosmos Focus Area, which is the research group where the four will be based.
All of these researchers are linked by a common focus: how fluids are transported in the physical world. They are also linked by the fact that they use the same research methodology known as partial differential equations, which are ways to describe the physical world using mathematical formulas. Acharya’s research is focused on understanding turbomachinery and fluid transport in the eye, and Tohline is concerned with the movement of the burning fluids that make up stars. Twilley is concentrated on water movement as it relates to rehabilitating coastal and wetland ecosystems, while White’s studies are focused on modeling the underground movement of oil, gas and water.
“ CCT provides an environment for interdisciplinary research in the computational sciences,” said Acharya. “My research is in computational fluid dynamics, with an application focus in turbomachinery and biomedical flows, and there are a number of computational science and algorithm development areas where we can collaborate with other researchers in CCT to our mutual benefit.”
“ Through the CCT’s exciting and forward-looking programs, I am anxious to help foster the development of research groups across the campus who can take full advantage of emerging high-performance computing and grid technologies. I also look forward to helping to promote innovative developments in scientific visualization in a variety of research arenas,” Tohline said.
The new associate faculty members will be able to use CCT’s connections and computational expertise to further their research in their individual areas of interest. The appointments also bolster the research impact the center will have on Louisiana and the globe.
“ We are excited to have the additions of these four distinguished faculty. Their partnership combined with the computing resources available at CCT could lead to amazing findings in the months and years ahead,” said CCT Director Edward Seidel. “These appointments also help us realize our goal of building a more critical mass to broaden our international reach and influence on the computational sciences.”
These faculty are currently involved in other interdisciplinary, jointly-funded projects with CCT including the National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship, or IGERT, program in computational fluid dynamics, which trains and prepares graduate students to perform research in all areas of coast to cosmos. In addition to bringing their own research to the group, these faculty join existing investigators already doing research on black holes.
Martin D. Woodin, LSU System President Emeritus, 1915-2006
LSU System President Emeritus Martin D. Woodin, one of LSU’s longest serving presidents, an educator and approachable administrator known for his calm demeanor and thoughtful leadership, died April 11 in Baton Rouge following a lengthy illness. He was 90. Woodin retired as System President in March 1985, capping 44 years of service to LSU, including 13 years as leader of the multi-campus system
A native of Sicily Island in Central Louisiana, Woodin joined the LSU faculty in 1941. A year later, World War II prompted him to enlist in the U.S. Navy, where he commanded amphibious landing craft in the Pacific Theatre from 1942 to 1946. Following the war, he returned to LSU as an associate professor of Agricultural Economics in 1947, becoming a full professor in only five years, and eventually department chair from 1957 to 1959. He also served as director of resident instruction in the College of Agriculture from 1959 to 1960; first dean of the then newly established campus of LSU Alexandria from 1960 to 1962; and executive vice president of the LSU System from 1962 to 1972. On July 1, 1972, Woodin succeeded John Hunter as the second president of the LSU System, capping a meteoric rise from professor to university president in only 10 years.
Barry Moser, LSU Department of Experimental Statistics Head, 1955-2006
Barry Moser, 50, head of the Department of Experimental Statistics in the LSU College of Agriculture and a researcher with the LSU AgCenter, died April 19, of a heart attack. Moser had served as department head since 1997.
Moser came to LSU in 1985 as an assistant professor in experimental statistics, and, in 1990, he became an associate professor. Moser’s area of expertise was applied statistics, and he worked collaboratively with countless researchers in analyzing and interpreting their research. A native of Greensboro, N.C., Moser taught many courses including statistical techniques, biological population statistics, sampling techniques and multivariate statistics, among others, and co-developed exploratory statistical data analysis. Moser also aided many on-campus departments and AgCenter Experimental Stations with statistical consulting and computational assistance.