CONNECTED LEARNING AND LIVING
Cobb Hall students collaborate 24/7
T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O R T H C A R O L I N A A T C H A P E L H I L L
I N S I D E : T a y l o r B r a n c h • T e r r i f i c T e a c h e r s • J e w i s h S t u d i e s • $ 5 m i l l i o n g i f t s
F A L L • 2 0 0 6
a r t s & s c i e n c e s C A R O L I N A
T H E C O L L E G E O F
A R T S & S C I E N C E S
• Madeline G. Levine
Interim Dean
• William Andrews ’70MA, ’73 PhD
Senior Associate Dean,
Fine Arts and Humanities
• Bruce Carney
Senior Associate Dean, Sciences
• Arne Kalleberg
Senior Associate Dean, Social Sciences
and International Programs
• Tammy McHale
Senior Associate Dean,
Finance and Planning
• James W. May
Senior Associate Dean, Program Development;
Executive Director, Arts & Sciences Foundation
• Bobbi Owen
Senior Associate Dean,
Undergraduate Education
Arts & Sciences Foundation
Board of Directors
• Ivan V. Anderson, Jr. ’61, Charleston, SC, Chair
• Madeline G. Levine, Chapel Hill, NC, President
• William L. Andrews, ‘70 MA, ‘73 PhD,
Chapel Hill, NC, Vice President
• Tammy J. McHale, Chapel Hill, NC, Treasurer
• James W. May, Jr., Chapel Hill, NC, Secretary
• James L. Alexandre ’79, London, UK
• D. Shoffner Allison ’98, Charlotte, NC
• William S. Brenizer ’74, Glen Head, NY
• Vicki Underwood Craver ’92, Cos Cob, CT
• Steven M. Cumbie ’70, ’73 MBA, McLean, VA
• Archie H. Davis ’64, Savannah, GA
• Robin Richards Donohoe ’87, San Francisco, CA
• Gail McGregor Fearing ’66, Chapel Hill, NC
• Alan Feduccia, Chapel Hill, NC
• Mary Dewar Froelich ’83, Charlotte, NC
• Robin March Hanes ’78, Asheville, NC
• William T. Hobbs, II ’85, Charlotte, NC
• Lynn Buchheit Janney ’70, Butler, MD
• Matthew G. Kupec ’80, Chapel Hill, NC
• William M. Lamont, Jr. ’71, Dallas, TX
• Cathy Bryson Moore ’90, Santa Monica, CA
• Paula R. Newsome ’77, Charlotte, NC
• Benjamine Reid ’71, Miami, FL
• Emily Pleasants Sternberg ’88, ’94 MBA,
Greenwich, CT
• G. Kennedy Thompson ’73, Charlotte, NC
• S. Thompson Tygart ’62, Jacksonville, FL
• Thomas M. Uhlman ’71, MS, ’75 PhD,
Murray Hill, NJ
• Charles L. Wickham, III, ’82 BSBA, London, UK
• Michael R. Zimmerman ’75, New York, NY
Creativity and connectivity
across the College
It’s an honor and a pleasure to be serving as
interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences while
the search is under way for a new dean. As a long-time
faculty member of the College, I join my colleagues in
congratulating former Dean Bernadette Gray-Little on
her promotion to executive vice-chancellor and provost
for the University.
As a professor in the Slavic languages and literatures
department since 1974, I’ve seen first hand how the
College’s approach to undergraduate education makes Carolina unique. In this issue of
Carolina Arts & Sciences, you’ll read about the new Connected Learning Program in Cobb
Residence Hall, where undergraduate students live and work together on interdisciplinary
projects of their own design. .
Continuing our focus on the undergraduate experience, we feature College faculty who
excel in teaching and research. Psychology professor Joe Lowman and historian Peter Filene
have won the highest University teaching honors, including the Bowman and Gordon Gray
professorships. And Jodi Magness, a leading archaeologist of ancient Palestine, shares her
expertise with students in the classroom and on annual digs to Israel.
You can also see how our faculty and students make connections across the disciplines.
You’ll read about how our Carolina Center for Jewish Studies draws on faculty strengths and
courses in political science, American studies, religious studies, history, English, Germanic
languages and literatures, and Slavic languages and literatures.
Our students and faculty also make connections around the world. We share a dispatch
from Stephanie Preston, a junior international studies major who was nearing the completion
of an internship at The Daily Star in Beirut, when the conflict between Israel and Lebanon
escalated.
The College’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities, which provides support for faculty
to make connections with colleagues across the University, is expanding its mission to help
faculty grow as leaders. The institute has received a $5 million gift from alumni Barbara and
Pitt Hyde. Their support will endow and name the Ruel W. Tyson Academic Leadership
Program in honor of the extraordinary teacher and leader who directed the institute for nearly
20 years, from its inception to his recent retirement. The Hydes’ gift will help cultivate the
next generation of bold academic leaders.
In other exciting news, FedEx has given $5 million to support the stunning global
education building that will open on campus this spring, housing most of the College’s
international programs under one roof.
Finally, we share an excerpt from alumnus Taylor Branch’s latest book in his trilogy on
Martin Luther King Jr. At Canaan’s Edge covers one of the most tumultuous periods of modern
U.S history, 1965-68. Branch spent those years at Carolina, where he earned a B.A. in political
science and history in the College.
The teaching, research, learning and facilities highlighted in our magazine are supported
by a combination of state and private funds, including the generous support of our alumni
and friends, many of whom are listed in our Honor Roll.
They demonstrate that a connection to Carolina and the College of Arts and Sciences
lasts a lifetime — and can leave a legacy for many generations of students.
Madeline G. Levine, Interim Dean
FROM THE DEAN F R O M T H E D E A N
Carolina Arts & Sciences • Fall 2006
Madeline G. Levine
Dan Sears
CONTENTS TA BL E OF C ON T E N T S
Carolina Arts & Sciences • Fall 2006
DE P A R T ME N T S
inside front cover
FROM THE DEAN
Creativity and connectivity
across the College
2 HIGH ACHIEVERS
Remarkable students, award-winning
academic advisers, alumni Oscars,
Bowman and Gordon Gray teaching
stars, a Pulitzer winner, Guggenheim
Fellowships, and more
20 HIGHLIGHTS
$5 million gifts for global education
and academic leadership, honoring
professor Ruel Tyson, a student’s
dispatch from Beirut, research on
shattering the“glass ceiling,” student
filmmaker Courtney Garcia, and more
26 COLLEGE BOOKSHELF
Alumnus Taylor Branch ’68 shares
an excerpt from At Canaan’s Edge,
the latest book in his trilogy on Martin
Luther King Jr., plus notes about new
books from across the arts and sciences.
28 2006 HONOR ROLL
We salute alumni and friends for their
generous support of the College of Arts
and Sciences.
inside back cover
COMING SOON
Global warming expert Wallace
Broecker, foreign policy analyst
Richard Haass and award-winning
novelist Tim O’Brien are among the
luminaries speaking on campus in the
coming months.
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 1
16
F E AT U R E S
8 • Connecting the
Dots 24/7
Undergraduates live and work
together for change through the
innovative Connected Learning
Program in Cobb Hall
13 • Jewish Studies Soars
Growing support for a growing
interdisciplinary program
15 • Digging It
Archaeologist Jodi Magness is a
leading expert on ancient Palestine
16 • Terrific Teachers
Psychology professor Joe Lowman
and historian Peter Filene share a
passion for teaching
Cover photo: From left, undergraduates Ivana Vu, Rezwan Ahmed, Naman Shah, Kevin Henderson
and Brittany Ballance, in front of Cobb Hall, where they chose to live in order to collaborate on a
project that advanced understanding and treatment of malaria in Guyana. (Photo by Steve Exum)
13
24
Mary Williams
Scholarship. Roberts of
Midland, N.C., also is pursuing
a minor in astronomy. He
plans to pursue a doctorate in
computer science and build
data analysis tools for scientists,
especially physicists and
astronomers. The Goldwater
is given to undergraduates
who demonstrate a strong
commitment to careers in
mathematics, the natural
sciences or engineering.
• Nitin Sekar, a junior biology and
environmental science major, won a
Morris K. Udall Scholarship for academic
excellence and commitment to preserving
the environment. The scholarship will
help Sekar of Cincinnati, Ohio, realize his
goals of studying the connections between
wildlife conservation and poverty reduction
throughout the world. He plans to pursue
graduate studies in animal behavior and
evolutionary biology.
• Thomas A. Thekkekandam ’04
of Durham, N.C., received a Jack Kent
Cooke Scholarship, one of the nation’s most
generous merit scholarships for graduate
school. Thekkekandam, who majored
in political science and psychology, will
HIGH ACHIEVERS
2 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
H I G H A C H I E V E R S
Remarkable
students
The scholarships keep rolling in for
Nicholas Love ’05, who is pursuing graduate
studies in biology and plans a career in stem
cell research. Love of Brighton, Mich., a biology
graduate, added a 2006 Luce Scholarship
and a National Science Foundation Graduate
Research Fellowship to the list.
Love had already won two other highly
competitive scholarships — a Churchill and
a Goldwater — while at UNC. The Luce
Scholarship will allow him to study for a year
in Japan and to pursue his interest in tissue
regeneration research.
The College of Arts and Sciences had
two Luce scholars this year, with David
Chapman ’03 also receiving one. Chapman
of Northbrook, Ill., is assistant director of the
Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. The former
Fulbright Scholar is a dramatic art graduate.
Chapman hopes to develop lasting artistic
collaborations with international artists and to
learn more about theater in Vietnam.
College students won a number of other
distinguished scholarships this year:
• E. Mary Williams, a senior political
science and religious studies major, won a
Truman Scholarship. Williams of Washington,
D.C., is the second Robertson Scholar in
a row from Carolina to win the Truman,
given to students committed to careers in
public service, government, education or the
nonprofit sector. She plans to earn master’s
and doctorate degrees in education and work
toward equal access to quality education in
American schools.
• Adam J. Roberts, a senior
mathematics and computer science
major, was awarded a Barry M. Goldwater
pursue an MBA at UNC and a law degree
at Duke University. He wants to specialize
in international and human rights law and in
sustainable enterprise and entrepreneurship.
Since graduation, Thekkekandam has worked
for The Fund for Public Interest Research and
The Link Group, a market research firm with
offices in Atlanta and Durham.
• Katelyn Love, a junior political science
and international studies major, received a
David L. Boren Scholarship to pursue a year of
study abroad in Syria at the French Institute of
Arab Studies of Damascus. Love of Columbus,
N.C., hopes to become fluent in Arabic; she
already speaks French, Estonian and Spanish.
Love’s possible career goals include working as
a political analyst or translator. •
Nicholas Love Adam J. Roberts
Thomas A. Thekkekandam Katelyn Love
HIGH ACHIEVERS
Award-winning academic advisers
Academic advisers in the College
are on a winning streak. Three won awards
from the National Academic Advising
Association, and another was recognized
with a top UNC advising honor.
The national winners are Carolyn
Cannon, associate dean and director of
Academic Advising; Alice C. Dawson,
assistant director of Academic Advising;
and Todd Austell, faculty adviser for
chemistry majors, academic adviser for the
sciences and a research assistant professor.
Daniel Anderson, associate professor
of English, was named an Abbey Fellow
by the College for his excellent work in
academic advising.
Cannon has “transformed the face
of advising at UNC-Chapel Hill,” said
Bobbi Owen, senior associate dean for
undergraduate education. She oversees
a staff of 19 full-time advisers, 28 part-time
faculty advisers and 11 staff support
members. In July, another five full-time
advisers were added to the program.
Dawson has previously won the
Mickel-Shaw
Excellence in
Advising Award
twice — the
maximum allowed
under the
advising program’s
selection
procedure.
Austell
has received
three University
advising awards:
the Mickel-Shaw
Excellence in
Advising Award
in 1997, the
College of Arts
and Sciences
Excellence in
AND THE OSCAR GOES TO...
Tar Heel fever heated up the 2006
Academy Awards, with a Carolina student
and an alum winning Oscars, and another
alum being nominated for one.
History grad Hughes Winborne ’75,
a Raleigh native, won a film editing Oscar
for Crash. The Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences honored the movie
with two other Oscars — for best picture
and best original screenplay – out of six
nominations.
Winborne has been editing films
since the early ’90s, previously making
a name for himself with a number of
independent films, most notably Billy Bob
Thornton’s Academy Award-winning 1996
drama, Sling Blade.
Dramatic art graduate Jim Bissell ’73
also was nominated for an Oscar for
art direction for Good Night and Good
Luck, the Hollywood hit about broadcast
journalist Edward R. Murrow.
Sean Overbeeke ’06, who minored
in the writing for the screen and stage
program in the College of Arts and
Sciences, won a first-place
gold medal in the 33rd annual
Student Academy Awards,
which recognize the country’s
most promising young
filmmakers. His film, Christmas
Wish List, which was filmed on
Franklin Street, competed in
the narrative category.
Overbeeke’s film had
already taken second place
in the Angelus Student Film
Festival, one of the top student
film festivals in the country, and
it was shown at the Sundance
Film Festival.
Overbeeke grew up in
Enfield, Conn. He is already at
work on a script for his next
film. •
Advising Award in 1999 and the Class
of 1996 Excellence in Advising Award
in 2002. He also has won top teaching
awards, including a Graduate Teaching
Award in 1990, a Students’ Undergraduate
Teaching Award in 2002 and a James M.
Johnston Teaching Excellence Award in
2004.
Anderson is director of under-graduate
studies in the department of
English, where he oversees advising for
English majors. For the past decade, he has
been at the forefront of efforts to integrate
information technologies into the teaching
of writing and literature.
The Abbey Fellows Program — begun
in 2004 with a $1 million gift from 1974
alumna Nancy Abbey and her husband,
Douglas, of San Francisco — is designed
to enhance academic advising for
undergraduates as they enter their major
fields of study. •
BELOW, FROM LEFT: Alice Dawson,
Carolyn Cannon and Todd Austell won national
advising awards.
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 3
Dan Sears
KALLEBERG NAMED
PRESIDENT-ELECT OF
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL
ASSOCIATION
Sociologist and senior associate dean
Arne L. Kalleberg has been named president-elect
of the American Sociological Association
(ASA) and will become president for a one-year
term beginning in August 2007.
Election to president is the highest
honor ASA members can bestow on a
colleague. As president, he also will serve
as chair of the ASA Council, which governs
the association and its policies. The ASA, the
largest professional association for sociologists,
has nearly 14,000 members and publishes 10
professional journals and magazines.
Kalleberg is Kenan Distinguished
Professor of Sociology and senior associate
dean for social sciences and international
programs in the College. He also is a fellow of
the Carolina Population Center.
Kalleberg served as secretary of ASA
from 2001-2004 and twice chaired the
organizations, occupations and work section.
His research and teaching focus on
labor force issues at the interface of sociology,
economics and psychology. He studies
flexible staffing arrangements — such as
temporary, part-time and contract work —
looking at the quality of such jobs, employers’
motivations for creating them and workers’
reasons for taking them.
His current projects also include an
analysis of changes in job quality in the
United States, the nature of the working poor
in America, an assessment of major ways in
which people and jobs are mismatched in
industrial societies and analyses of cross-national
attitudes toward work.
He has published more than 100 articles
and chapters and co-authored or co-edited
nine books. •
YARDLEY WINS PULITZER
Carolina alumnus Jim Yardley, a foreign
correspondent for The New York Times, won
a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting,
along with the Times’ Beijing Bureau Chief
Joseph Kahn, for their
“ambitious stories on
ragged justice in China
as the booming nation’s
legal system evolves.”
Yardley, who has
been in China since
2003, received a B.A.
in history from UNC in
1986. He is the son of
two Carolina alumni and
journalists: Greensboro
News & Record
columnist Rosemary
Roberts (journalism ’60)
and Washington Post
book critic Jonathan
Yardley (English ’61),
a 1981 Pulitzer Prize
winner.
Jim Yardley has
traveled throughout
China and written on
a wide range of topics,
including social unrest,
rising inequality and the
country’s widespread
pollution problems. He
joined The Times in 1997 as a metropolitan
reporter in New York and moved to the
national desk in August 1999 as bureau chief
in Houston. He covered presidential politics,
the collapse of Enron, the death penalty and
water policy. In the months after the Sept. 11
terror attacks, he wrote many investigative
pieces about the hijackers. •
TWO ELECTED TO
AMERICAN ACADEMY
OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
Biologist Edward D. “Ted” Salmon
and historian Christopher Browning were
elected 2006 fellows of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences for preeminent
contributions to their fields and society.
They join a distinguished list of new
fellows and honorary foreign members which
includes former Presidents George H.W.
Bush and Bill Clinton, Supreme Court Chief
Justice John Roberts and director Martin
Scorsese.
Salmon, the James Larkin and Iona
Mae Ballou Distinguished Professor,
is an internationally recognized cell
biologist who studies the mechanisms by
which microtubules generate forces for
chromosome separation during cell division
and for cell motility. Such forces affect the
development of cancer.
Browning, the Frank Porter Graham
Distinguished Professor, specializes in the
history of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany.
He has written extensively about the
decision-making process that launched the
“Final Solution” and the motivation of the
perpetrators. He has published seven books
in the field of Holocaust studies, including
two that have been awarded the National
Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust
category. •
4 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
HIGH ACHIEVERS
ABOVE: Jim Yardley along the Yellow River in central China.
LEFT TO RIGHT: Arne L. Kalleberg, “Ted” Salmon, Christopher Browning
Ruth Fremson
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 5
HIGH ACHIEVERS
Four more teaching stars
Four scholars have been awarded Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term
Professorships, among the University’s most prestigious awards for excellence in outstanding
undergraduate teaching.
The late Gordon Gray ’30 and the estate of Bowman Gray Jr. ’29 established the
professorships in 1980 in the College. Bernard Gray ’72 of Atlanta significantly enhanced the
professorships in 1999.
“The most important effort that UNC can expend is to attract and retain
outstanding faculty,” said Bernard Gray, now president of Gray Ventures in Atlanta.
“The four new professors appointed this year exemplify the high standards to which the
Bowman and Gordon Gray Professorship program aspires.”
Rachel Willis, associate professor of American studies, and Bland Simpson,
associate professor and director of the English department’s creative writing program,
were named to five-year professorships effective July 1, 2006. Valerie Ashby, associate
professor of chemistry, and Patrick Conway, professor of economics, were named to
professorships effective from July 1, 2007.
Willis has developed innovative courses for the American studies curriculum,
including “The Role of the University in American Life.” Her students travel to unusual
parts of the community and area university campuses to explore how access to education is
affected by history, resources and the physical development of the campuses.
She has won two University teaching awards, multiple Senior Class Superlative Faculty
Awards and the first Bryan Award for Public Service for her
role in creating the Carolina Center for Public Service and
contributing to the APPLES service-learning program.
Simpson has directed the College’s creative writing
program since 2002 and taught in the program since 1982. Last
year he was awarded the state’s highest civilian honor, the North
Carolina Award, in the fine arts category.
He won a UNC Tanner Award for Excellence in
Undergraduate Teaching in 2004. He has written a novel and
three books of nonfiction, and is a member of the Tony Award-winning
string band The Red Clay Ramblers.
Ashby, who came to Carolina in 2004, was named Iowa
State University Teacher of the Year in the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences in 2001. The American Chemical Society
named her one of the top 12 young female chemists in the
country in 2002. Her other awards include a 3M Young Faculty
Award, a DuPont Young Faculty Award and an NSF Early Career
Development Award.
Conway has taught introductory, international and
development economics, as well as macroeconomics, to
undergraduate and graduate students, and the first-year seminar,
“The Economics of North Carolina.” He won the William
C. Friday/Class of 1986 Award for Excellence in Teaching in
2001 and has won a total of five awards from the economics
department for excellence in teaching undergraduate and
graduate students. •
Valerie Ashby
Patrick Conway
DURBAN’S ESSAY SELECTED
FOR PUSHCART PRIZE
An essay by Pam Durban, the Doris
Betts Distinguished Professor of Creative
Writing, has been selected for the 2006
edition of the Pushcart Prize Best of the
Small Presses anthology.
The book will be
published in November.
Durban’s essay,
“Clocks,” which was first
published in the literary
magazine Shenandoah,
will be included in volume
31 of the anthology.
“Clocks” is about the death of the writer’s
father and her observations on how his
sense of time served him throughout his
life. The piece is among a series of Durban’s
essays on the death of parents.
The Pushcart Prize series, published
every year since 1976, has been named
among the most influential projects in
the history of American publishing by
Publishers Weekly. Small magazine and book
press editors annually may make up to six
nominations from their publications for
the prize.
According to Library Journal, “These
authors are not only our finest storytellers,
poets and essayists, they are also the
guardians of our language.”
Durban came to Carolina in 2001
from Georgia State University, where
she was director of the creative writing
program. She is the author of two novels
and a collection of short fiction. •
Pam Durban
6 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
HIGH ACHIEVERS
GUGGENHEIMS AWARDED
TO PERDUE, STIMSON
Historian Theda Perdue and political
scientist James Stimson were awarded
Guggenheim Fellowships, which recognize
and support their research. The fellowships
honor distinguished past achievement
and exceptional promise for future
accomplishment.
Perdue, Atlanta Distinguished Term
Professor of History, will use her fellowship
for the book project, “American Indians in the
segregated South: 1865-1965.”
Stimson, Raymond Dawson
Bicentennial Distinguished Professor of
Political Science, will use his fellowship for
the book project, “The liberalism of professed
conservatives in America.”
Perdue’s book, under contract to UNC
Press, will explore how Native American
communities across the South managed to
survive in the 19th and early 20th centuries
— especially in the face of segregation laws
that demanded that they be classified as
either black or white. In this context, there
was no place for Native Americans, many of
whom lived in historical anonymity, without
treaties, formal tribal governments or in many
cases, even names for themselves, Perdue
said.
“Reconstructing their story requires
piecing together fragments that are scattered
across the centuries since Europeans first
arrived in the Americas,” Perdue said.
Perdue’s overall research focuses on
Native Americans of the southeastern United
States and on gender in Native societies.
Stimson will explore the group of
citizens he calls “conflicted conservatives”
with his fellowship.
When Americans are asked to describe
themselves in terms of ideology, far more
people — by a margin of almost two to one
— choose the label “conservative” than its
opposite, “liberal,” Stimson said. But it is also
true that when asked to choose between
policies, American voters choose liberal over
conservative options by almost that same two
to one margin, he added.
“We know that conflicted conservatives
are a sizable group, about 22 percent
of all Americans, which almost matches
the numbers of real liberals and real
conservatives,” said Stimson, who is working
on a book about the topic. “We know who
they are, and we can track their attitudes and
behaviors. What is much less clear is why?”
Stimson’s overall research focuses on
macro theory and American politics. •
MANOCHA NAMED
PHI DELTA THETA/MATTHEW
MASON PROFESSOR
Dinesh Manocha, an expert in
computer graphics and geometric modeling,
has been named the Phi Delta Theta/
Matthew Mason Distinguished Professor.
The new professorship in the College
is the second endowed chair to be funded
by a fraternity at UNC. Philosophy scholar
C.D.C. “David” Reeve was named Delta
Kappa Epsilon (DKE) Distinguished Professor
in summer 2005.
Under the leadership of Shoff Allison
’98 of Charlotte, 243 donors raised nearly
$736,000 in gifts and pledges for the Phi
Delta Theta/Matthew Mason Professorship.
Garnett Smith ’69 of Naples, Fla., gave the
lead gift of $100,000.
The professorship qualifies for a
matching grant of $334,000 from the North
Carolina Distinguished Professors Endowment
Trust Fund, bringing the endowment to
more than $1 million. It is named in honor
of the late Matthew Mason of Chapel Hill, a
beloved, long-time employee of the Phi Delta
Theta house who was made a member of the
fraternity later in his career.
Manocha has been on UNC’s computer
science faculty since 1992. His research on
mathematical foundations and applications has
been used in scientific computations, robotics,
3-D computer graphics and virtual reality
by the scientific community, the computer
industry and the entertainment world.
He has published more than 200 papers
with his collaborators. With Ming C. Lin, also
a computer science professor, Manocha leads
the GAMMA research group in the computer
science department. The group has produced
several research software libraries that have
been downloaded by tens of thousands
of users and licensed by more than 40
commercial vendors.
Manocha teaches courses on graphics,
modeling and robotics. He has supervised
more than 35 master’s and doctoral students.
He and his students have won at least eight
best paper awards at major computer science
conferences.
His research awards include UNC’s
Hettleman Award for Scholarly Achievement
in 1998, the Alfred P. Sloan Research
Fellowship from the Sloan Foundation in
1995, the Young Investigator Award from the
Office of Naval Research in 1996 and the
National Science Foundation CAREER Award
in 1995.
The sorority Delta Delta Delta at UNC
is leading a campaign to fund the first sorority
professorship. •
Theda Perdue James Stimson Dinesh Manocha
HIGH ACHIEVERS
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 7
SHAPIRO’S
WORK
SELECTED
FOR BEST
AMERICAN
ANTHOLOGIES
An essay and
poem by English
professor Alan
Shapiro have been
selected for 2006
editions of two Best
American anthologies.
Shapiro, an award-winning
writer, is the William R. Kenan Jr.
Distinguished Professor of English
in the creative writing program. His
essay, “Why Write?” was chosen
for Best American Essays 2006, and
his poem, “Misjudged Flyball” was
chosen for Best American Poetry
2006. The books are due out this
fall from Houghton Mifflin. Editors
read through hundreds of poems
published in journals and magazines
across the country to select poems
for inclusion in the anthologies.
Both of Shapiro’s pieces
appeared in the spring 2005 issue
of The Cincinnati Review and will
be included in his upcoming books.
The poem and essay are about Shapiro’s
friend, Tim Dekin, who died in 2001 of a
rare lung disorder.
Shapiro won the 2005 Roanoke-
Chowan Award for Poetry, one of North
Carolina’s most prestigious book awards,
for Tantalus in Love (Houghton Mifflin,
2005). He won the same award in 2002
for Song and Dance.
Shapiro is the author of eight books
of poetry. He also has written works of
criticism, translation and two memoirs,
of which The Last Happy Occasion was
a finalist for the National Book Critics
Circle Award. •
Sing Out: UNC grad student edits
folk music magazine
Blaine Waide’s new job is in perfect harmony with his longtime interest in folk culture.
Waide, a UNC folklore graduate student, became the managing editor of Sing Out!
magazine in summer 2006. Pete Seeger was instrumental in the founding of the magazine,
and its title comes from “The Hammer Song” that Seeger co-wrote with Lee Hays.
For 56 years, the pioneering publication has been covering the breadth of folk music.
Singers Joan Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary; Bob Dylan and Doc Watson have been featured.
Waide is a huge fan of blues music. His undergraduate honors thesis at the University
of Arkansas was on blues in folklore, with field work done at “a juke joint in Mississippi.” In
high school, he listened to Dylan and Jerry Garcia and later, Muddy Waters.
Blues from the Delta,
a book by UNC’s Bill Ferris,
the Joel R. Williamson
Eminent Professor of
History, had a huge impact
on Waide.
“It largely shaped
how I approached the topic
and was far and away the
most influential book on
the subject I had read,”
Waide said.
Ferris later became
Waide’s master’s thesis
adviser, and Waide helped
to process the film portion
of Ferris’ work for UNC’s
Southern Folklife Collection.
The admiration is mutual.
“As a graduate student in the curriculum in folklore, Blaine did a pioneering study of
folk art and musical traditions in the Piedmont,” said Ferris, who also is senior associate
director of the Center for the Study of the American South.
In this next chapter of his life, Waide hopes to write about current issues affecting blues
music for Sing Out! And he’ll be working on his master’s thesis, which will explore periods
of folk revivalism in the 1930s, 1960s and today — including the “O Brother, Where Art
Thou?” movie-and-music phenomenon.
In 2004, Waide won the Cratis D. Williams Prize, given annually by the North
Carolina Folklore Society to the best graduate study of the state’s folk life. Waide wrote
about the Winston-Salem blues scene, and his piece was published in the North Carolina
Folklore Journal.
Sing Out! claims as part of its mission “to encourage making folk music a part of our
everyday lives.”
As the publication’s new managing editor, Waide is delighted to carry that torch.
“I’m interested in the magazine’s goal of keeping folk culture present and active.” •
Alan Shapiro
ABOVE: Blaine Waide is the new managing editor
of Sing Out!, the magazine founded by Pete Seeger.
Dan Sears
8 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
PICTURE THIS: Four undergraduates
spend their winter break in a Latin
American country plagued by malaria
and poverty. They fight stifling humidity,
deadly mosquitoes, government
bureaucracy and occasionally each other,
while sharing a cramped hotel room in a
strange land. Just as they are about to give
up on their mission, doors open leading to
unexpected lessons about themselves and
their ability to affect change in the world.
This is not a script for “reality” TV.
No one was voted off the continent or sent
home to collect a million dollars. Instead,
our intrepid heroes are Carolina students
who became good friends while living in a
unique residential hall on campus during
the academic year and traveling abroad
during their winter holiday to enhance
awareness, prevention and treatment of
malaria in the developing world.
Cobb Hall students live and
work together for change
Left to Right: C O N N E C T I N G the Dots 24/7
By Dee Reid • Photos by Steve Exum
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 9
continued
Student Affairs and the James M. Johnston
Center for Undergraduate Excellence in the
College of Arts and Sciences. The inaugural
year was supported by each organization’s
general funds, with students raising
supplementary funds on their own.
• A NEW TWIST ON RESIDENTIAL LEARNING
Lots of universities have themed
housing set aside for students who wish
to live together while practicing a foreign
language or exploring an emerging issue.
And other schools encourage students to
engage in hands-on learning as part of a
growing trend in experiential education.
What’s different about Carolina is that it
combines and expands these concepts by
inviting multiple groups of students with
diverse interests and knowledge to live
together in Cobb Hall while tackling a
range of topics. Each group is given about
$1,000 to launch a self-directed project. The
teams must create a realistic plan and budget,
raise additional funds and do whatever
it takes to reach their goals, including
educational activities on and off campus.
The idea is for students to shape
their own learning beyond the traditional
boundaries of disciplines and classrooms, to
draw connections between their academic
studies and their lives, to excel in their
individual interests and to collaborate
with peers and faculty advisers on a
group enterprise designed to expand their
intellectual horizons. Program participants
include first-year and transfer students who
apply for coveted spots in Cobb before
arriving on campus and upper-class students
who serve as project mentors.
The result is a residential incubator
brimming with some of the sharpest students
on campus, working in small groups on
issues that excite them. In addition to
addressing malaria in Guyana, Cobb Hall
teams published a literary magazine and an
interdisciplinary online journal, produced a
photo documentary of campus life and a film
about homelessness in Chapel Hill. Others
staged an original play celebrating cultural
diversity and a dance festival to raise funds
for AIDS treatment. Students also sponsored
a series of guest lectures on hot topics and
organized conferences on the challenges
confronting Hispanic immigrants. Because
students lived together they could meet
informally any time to discuss and develop
their projects.
“These are hard-working, creative
students with the ability to dream big and
get things done,” said Randi Davenport,
executive director of the Johnston Center.
“They worked in teams and every member
of each team was critically important to the
success of the project.”
The idea for a collaborative program
involving academic affairs and residential
housing originated with Christopher Payne,
associate vice chancellor for student affairs.
He called on James Leloudis,
associate dean of honors and
director of the Johnston Cen-ter.
Together with Davenport
and Joe Boehman, assistant
director of Housing and Resi-dential
Education, they came
up with the concept for the
Connected Learning Program
in Cobb Hall.
“One of the missions
of the Johnston Center is to
provide a setting in which
students and faculty forge
communities of common
interest and offer programs
During a three-week visit to Guyana
on the northern coast of South America,
they trained healthcare personnel and
set up a drug-resistance study, gathered
information for an educational brochure
and children’s coloring book for the
national nutrition program, took photos
documenting one family’s struggle with
poverty and disease and, in their spare time,
volunteered at a children’s aid center.
Back on campus they conducted
molecular research, sponsored educational
programs, finished their publications,
transcribed and edited a documentary
and shared their results during the annual
symposium on undergraduate research at
the end of the year.
Their story begins in Chapel Hill
with the development of the Connected
Learning Program at UNC’s Cobb
Residence Hall — a new and innovative
experiment in living and learning together
24/7. Malaria project members Rezwan
Ahmed, Brittany Ballance, Kevin
Henderson, Naman Shah and Ivana Vu
comprise just one of 10 groups of students
— about 60 in all — who earned their
places on the first floor of the handsomely
renovated co-ed residence on Country
Club Boulevard by agreeing to work
together on ambitious, interdisciplinary
learning projects of their own design.
The Cobb program is a joint project
of Housing and Residential Education in
Cobb Hall researchers-in-residence Ivana Vu, Kevin Henderson, Naman Shah, Rezwan Ahmed and Brittany Ballance
10 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
that reach across disciplinary boundaries,
linking the classroom to other learning
communities,” Payne explained. “Similarly
the mission of Housing and Residential
Education is to provide campus housing
communities that augment and extend
learning that occurs in the classroom. With
so much in common, it was a natural
partnership between Student Affairs and
the College of Arts and Sciences to develop
an innovative residential learning program
that advances two top priorities of the
University’s academic plan: interdisciplinary
and experiential learning.”
Cobb Hall houses about 380 students,
including the 60 who participate in the
Connected Learning Program. The
program’s students live on the hall’s first
floor, most of them with a roommate who
is part of the program but not necessarily
working on the same project.
The program has six staff members
based in Cobb who offer their support,
including a doctoral student who serves as
program coordinator, an assistant director
for residential learning, a community
director and community coordinator and
two resident advisers.
Cobb students who served as project
mentors participated in the Carolina
Leadership and Development Peer-to-Peer
Mentoring Program, where students taught
each other how to be effective leaders. This
year, all students in the Connected Learning
Program will join in the leadership program.
Connected Learning Program students
do not necessarily receive academic credit for
their extra work, though some of them will
parlay their project activities into under-graduate
research projects conducted with
faculty advisers, as the Guyana team did.
The program is open to all students
who are eager for a “self-directed, build-your-
own experience,” said Davenport. It
provides a great opportunity for new stu-dents
to immerse themselves immediately
in a stimulating project, get to know other
students quickly and learn from a savvy up-per-
class mentor.
“I thought it would be interesting to
have students working on malaria from
different perspectives. It’s a brilliant idea
to integrate housing with a project. It
facilitates interactions, getting close with
others in a living environment.”
— Naman Shah
“It allowed us to jump right in, even
as freshmen,” said Ballance, who joined
the malaria project team in Cobb as a first-year
student. “Ordinarily first-year students
don’t do things like this.”
Students who especially enjoy their
first year in the program are encouraged
to remain in Cobb the following years to
work on new projects or mentor incoming
students. This year, Vu will lead a project
designed to encourage younger students in
the sciences.
• THE MALARIA PROJECT TEAM
Naman Shah of Cary, who graduated
in May with a degree in environmental
health sciences from the School of Public
Health, had the ideal background to
become a project mentor during his senior
year. He was passionate about malaria
research, had worked on drug treatments
with epidemiology professor Steven
Meshnick, and was comfortable living and
working in developing nations. He had
lived in India and conducted research in
Bolivia and Cambodia.
He also understood the importance
of service. He had been involved in the
Hunger Lunch program sponsored through
Nourish International, a Campus Y
committee that raised funds for nutritional
programs and sustainable development at
home and abroad.
Most important, Shah loved the idea of
living and learning with other students from
different disciplines.
“I thought it would be interesting to
have students working on malaria from
different perspectives,” he said. “It’s a
brilliant idea to integrate housing with a
project. It facilitates interactions, getting
close with others in a living environment.”
Shah’s intensity and idealism attracted
other students to join his project. Signing
on were: Henderson ’06, a chemistry
major from Cary who had been Shah’s
roommate before Cobb; Ahmed, a senior
from Flatwoods, Ky., majoring in biology
and psychology; and Ballance and Vu, then
incoming first-year students from Fremont
and Gastonia, N.C. respectively, who
were intrigued by the possibilities of living
and working with other students. Vu is
interested in biology, environmental science
and photography, and Balance likes biology
and medicine.
Left to Right: Newly renovated Cobb Hall (left) served as home base for the Malaria Project team (right), who could be found
discussing their project any time, such as during this walk in the woods across the street.
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 11
The challenges began as soon as
students arrived on campus for the
academic year: Extensive renovations to
Cobb Hall were not complete so they
had to live at first in the new student
family apartments off Mason Farm Road.
Undaunted, they moved into temporary
quarters, began meeting together and
making plans for project activities. When
Cobb Hall renovations were completed in
November, they were delighted to move
in and take advantage of their comfortable
new digs and the spacious meeting rooms.
Each student contributed special
talents to the Guyana project. Shah knew
from his research work that malaria, spread
by infected mosquitoes, is one of the
world’s most destructive tropical diseases,
resulting in 300-500 million cases and 2-
to-3 million deaths around the world each
year. He also understood that many malaria
strains had developed resistance to the most
common drug treatments.
It was Shah’s idea to work in
Guyana, which has one of the highest
rates of malaria infection in the world
(more than 260 people infected per 1,000
population). His goal was to help train
healthcare workers to test patients’ blood
for the genetic marker associated with drug
resistance. If researchers could understand
how prevalent the drug-resistance is, they
might develop better treatment policies and
prevent unnecessary illness and deaths.
Shah wanted to do even more. He
sought to raise awareness on campus about
the global malaria problem. He also sought
“an immersion experience” abroad with
other students, and he hoped to participate
in a project that would directly help a
malaria-stricken community.
Henderson, Ahmed, Vu and Ballance
brought diverse interests and skills to
enhance Shah’s original concept.
Henderson and Ahmed learned that
about half the population of Guyana is
affected by anemia, which is exacerbated by
the prevalence of malaria and poverty. They
knew the Ministry of Health had a program
to distribute iron supplements to anemic and
at-risk patients, but health officials needed
updated educational materials to help the
public understand the connection between
diet, nutrition and anemia. The two students
teamed up to develop materials for a public
education campaign to prevent and treat
anemia in Guyana.
Vu decided to use her photography
and interviewing skills to produce a photo
documentary about one Guyana family’s
experience with the disease.
Ballance, who was not able to travel
to Guyana due to an illness in her family,
focused on doing research for the project
and conducting educational programs
on campus. She oversaw an educational
presentation in the fall featuring Jesse Kwiek,
an epidemiologist in the School of Public
Health, who had contracted malaria while in
the Peace Corps in Malawi.
• CHRISTMAS IN GUYANA
On Dec. 18, Shah, Ahmed,
Henderson and Vu set off for Georgetown,
Guyana. On arrival, they ended up sharing
a cheap un-air-conditioned room. It wasn’t
easy negotiating personal space in cramped
quarters smaller than the worst dorm space
back on campus. Let’s just say that two of
them are neat-niks and two are not.
“It was sometimes
frustrating getting some
privacy,” said Ahmed.
“But it was not a major
problem. Sometimes
arguments arose and
we had to calm people
down.”
Because they were
already close since they
had lived in the same
residential hall, it wasn’t
too difficult to talk
through these issues,
he said.
Vu, the only
female on the Guyana
trip, agreed. “It was
quite an experience,” she said of sharing a
small space with three peers. “We all got so
close, it’s like I know them better than they
know themselves. I learn the most when
I’m taken out of my comfort zone, so it
was good.”
Except for Shah, none of them had
been on their own before in a developing
country. It wasn’t long before they
discovered that their timing was flawed
— most government offices were closed
for Christmas holidays during the first two
weeks of their stay. So the students had to
be persistent in tracking down officials.
“We had to be really, really patient,”
said Henderson. “We kept calling and
finally made a connection through the
Red Cross. Most of our work was actually
carried out during the last week. Now I
have a much better perspective about how
things work abroad.”
Another challenge came on Christmas
Day. They had been living on cheap
groceries and take-out food. But all the
stores and restaurants were closed on
continued
Left to Right: Learning around the clock: Cobb Hall features a multimedia room (at left),
large and small meeting spaces, and quiet places to play music (at right).
Left to Right: Ivana Vu spent several days sharing this home in Guyana, left, with this family, right,
learning how they were affected by malaria personally and economically.
12 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
Christmas. The only thing they could find
was a vending machine in a gas station.
Their holiday dinner consisted of crackers,
canned corn and some kind of milk
supplement.
They persevered. By the end of their
stay in Guyana, Henderson and Ahmed
had made the official contacts they needed
to begin developing educational materials.
Shah had laid the foundation for
a field study to test patients’ blood for
drug-resistance markers by meeting with
concerned officials at the Ministry of
Health and Georgetown referral hospitals.
Also, at Shah’s request, UNC’s Nourish
International program had donated
12,000 hemoglobin testing kits for anemia
detetection in maternal and child health
clinics, the AIDS programs and the
nutritional program in Guyana. He wrote
a training manual and trained 30 physician
assistants and 30 public health nursing staff
in the use of this blood testing process.
And Vu had spent several days in a
rural dwelling, photographing a family and
recording stories about how malaria had
affected them personally and economically.
“I met the mother at the Georgetown
Hospital, where she was waiting for her
husband to be tested for malaria,” Vu said.
“She had already lost her previous husband
to malaria and experienced the disease
herself about 10 years ago. Her five kids are
healthy and four of them (even the 7-year-old)
work 12 hours a day. They welcomed
me to their home, which was smaller than
our hotel room. There was no electricity,
phone, running water or bathroom, just a
bucket of water and an outhouse.”
The Cobb team returned home ready
to complete and present their projects.
Each of them presented their findings at
the Undergraduate Research Symposium
in April, an annual public event for all
student researchers held by the Office of
Undergraduate Research.
• LESSONS LEARNED
Through their experience abroad, the
students learned about much more than
malaria. “We learned how to work with a
foreign government and how to work with
each other,” said Shah.
“I love the concept, the opportunity to
have resources for a project like this. We
designed it ourselves. It’s also interesting
meeting others in the hall who are studying
and doing so many other interesting
projects. This was the best housing
experience of my whole undergraduate
career here.” — Kevin Henderson
“I had never been abroad by myself,”
said Ahmed, who was born in Bangladesh
and moved to the United States when
he was 3. “I learned the whole process
of how to overcome all of the obstacles.
We had high expectations and didn’t take
into account the holidays, the culture, the
atmosphere. But in the end, we did what
we wanted to accomplish.
“We got to go to a place where we
had never even thought of going before,”
he added. “Four distinct personalities were
brought together in pursuit of a common
goal, and we all faced some
obstacles, but at the same time
we were not overwhelmed by
them.”
Vu said she learned things
that she would not have been
exposed to in class. “I learned
so much -- bargaining with
sellers at the fruit market,
chatting with miners at the
malaria clinic, eating street
food, living in a two-person,
non-air-conditioned hotel
room with three other people,
finding my way to a small
village and getting lost there. I learned so
much about myself. I had no idea that I
could do these things.”
Henderson especially appreciated
the opportunity to design and carry out
a project of this magnitude from start to
finish, and to live on campus with other
students who are also involved in self-directed
projects.
“I love the concept, the opportunity
to have resources for a project like this,”
he said. “We designed it ourselves. It’s
also interesting meeting others in the hall
who are studying and doing so many
other interesting projects. This was the
best housing experience of my whole
undergraduate career here.”
Davenport, the Johnston Center’s
executive director, said the malaria project
was a great example of the overall success
of the Connected Learning Program in its
first year.
“All of the projects were fully realized
and some, like the malaria project, went
beyond their and our expectations for
them,” she said.
“These were ambitious, exciting,
dynamic, extraordinary projects for
undergraduates — most of them first-year
students — to undertake. They
were exposed to all kinds of ways to
accomplish great things on campus and
off campus. It was exciting to watch their
projects develop and see what students
were capable of tackling with the right
mentorships, support and resources.” •
Learn more about the program online at
www.johnstoncenter.unc.edu/clp/.
Ivana Vu
Ivana Vu
As a generation of Carolina
students comes of age during major
conflicts in the Middle East, many
are turning to Jewish Studies to help
understand the history, politics and culture
that have shaped the volatile region.
Students also are studying myriad
other aspects of the Jewish experience:
One class traces the history of Jewish
Southerners, and nearly 50 students are
learning modern Hebrew.
Classes and lectures about the history
of the Holocaust, taught by Christopher
Browning, the Frank Porter Graham
Distinguished Professor of History at
UNC, have typically been over-enrolled.
Browning is at the National Humanities
Center this year.
The Carolina Center for Jewish
Studies was founded in 2003 to study
Jewish history and culture. Since then,
enrollment in Jewish studies courses
has climbed. The program has received
substantial gifts, and a lecture series and
statewide outreach program attract
growing numbers.
“The center is part and parcel of
liberal arts education at Carolina,” said
founding director Jonathan M. Hess,
the Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin
Distinguished Professor in Jewish History
and Culture.
“We have more than 1,200 students
taking Jewish studies classes, and most
importantly, they are all from all different
backgrounds.”
Jewish studies isn’t new at Carolina,
since such classes were first taught in
the 1940s. But in the last decade, several
prominent faculty hires created a turning
point that sparked the interdisciplinary
center’s creation. Today the program
draws on the research and teaching
strengths of nine faculty members in
political science, American studies,
religious studies, history, English,
Germanic languages and literatures, and
Slavic languages and literatures.
“All of a sudden there was a new
concentration of faculty across campus
interested in Jewish studies,” said Hess,
who also is a professor in the department of
Germanic languages and literatures. “And
there was a growing interest from students.”
Momentum building
The center offers a minor in Jewish
studies and courses through a variety of
departments.
The Middle East crisis has sparked
interest among Jewish students with strong
ties to Israel and non-Jewish students with
equally strong ties to the Biblical region,
said Marcie Cohen Ferris, associate director
of the center and an assistant professor in
American studies.
“I think people are drawn to Jewish
studies because they’re interested in what’s
happening in the world and how it has
changed deeply historic places,” Ferris said.
Ferris teaches “Mamas and Matriarchs:
A Social History of Jewish Women in
America” and “Shalom Y’all: The Jewish
Experience in the American South.” She
said exploring Jewish life in the South is
one of the program’s unique advantages.
“We are certainly one of the largest
public universities in the South to offer a
Jewish studies program,” Ferris said. “And
because we are known for the study of the
South at UNC, that’s a particularly good
partnership.”
The center offers about 30 courses
and hopes eventually to have an academic
major, Hess said.
A significant boost
Recently, the center has received
significant private support. In 2006 came
the largest to date: a $1 million gift from
Leonard and Tobee Kaplan of Greensboro
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 13
continued
JEWISH
STUDIES
SOARS
Carolina students and the
public are eager to understand
the Jewish experience
BY PAMELA BABCOCK
RIGHT: A love letter from Joseph
Ehrlich, a drygoods merchant in
Milledgeville, Ga., to Rebecca
Smolensky, Jan. 1, 1896; they were
married the following year.
From the Ehrlich and Rabhan Family Papers #5129,
Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
to fund the Leonard and Tobee
Kaplan Distinguished Professorship,
an endowed chair in the College of
Arts and Sciences.
“After reviewing the various
areas, we felt there was one where a
contribution would lend something
new and different,” said Leonard
Kaplan, a 1949 Carolina alumnus
who runs the Greensboro-based
Toleo Foundation with his wife,
Tobee. “Ours is focused on modern
Judaism — its religious practices and
moral issues in the world.”
“It will allow us to get a
faculty star,” Hess said of the
endowment. “When we make that hire,
it will really put the program on the map
nationally and internationally.”
Several other professorships have also
been created. Moses and Hannah Malkin,
1941 UNC graduates from Sun City, Fla.,
gave funds to establish the distinguished
professorship recently awarded to Hess.
And the JMA and Sonja van der Horst
Distinguished Professorship in Jewish Studies
was established this year by the family in
memory of their parents. Their gift is made
possible by Sonja’s careful investment of
Holocaust reparation funds. Sonja had fled
Poland as a teen after her parents and sister
were killed by the Nazis. She decided to use
the funds to endow the professorship shortly
before she died in March.
Two of the couple’s children have
Carolina connections: Charles van der Horst,
a professor of medicine at UNC; and alumna
Jacqueline van der Horst Sergent ’82 MPH.
“These gifts represent great generosity
and a real sense of vision for both UNC
and the people who have given them,” said
Ferris. “They are making an investment in
the future of both Jewish and non-Jewish
students. It’s really an investment in helping
people understand each other.”
14 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
Lecture series popular
In 2004, with initial funding from
the Charles H. Revson Foundation in
honor of Eli N. Evans ’58, the center
created the North Carolina Jewish Studies
Lecture Series. Through this outreach
program, center faculty lecture at Jewish
and non-Jewish institutions, as well as to
secular and interfaith groups. They’ve
traveled to Charlotte, Greensboro and
Wilmington, and to smaller communities
such as Asheville, Goldsboro and
Fayetteville.
The center also has a public lecture
series that brings in world-renowned
scholars to UNC to speak about Jewish
life and also features film screenings. Each
year, more than 2,000 students, faculty
members and others attend. The public
lecture series relies on funding from
Revson and other donors.
“The really exciting thing is the
people who come from outside the
campus,” Hess said. “It exemplifies the
outreach mission of the University.”
More than 350 people turned out
last spring at UNC to hear Deborah
E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern
Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory
University, discuss her book and
successful libel trial against David
Irving, once considered the
world’s leading Holocaust denier.
Last year’s outreach
presentation on Jews in Cuba by
Rosa Perelmuter, an associate
professor of Spanish and adviser in
the College of Arts and Sciences,
drew a standing room only crowd
in Charlotte, Ferris said.
“These talks have been really
important for providing education
across the state and a link to the
University as we offer the newest
and best scholarship,” Ferris
added. “And for the scholars
who give these talks through our
outreach program, it’s personally
rewarding.”
Looking ahead
For the upcoming academic
year, Hess is on research leave
to work on a book about 19th
century German-Jewish popular culture.
Jeff Spinner-Halev, Kenan Eminent
Professor of Political Ethics, is the center’s
interim director.
While Carolina’s Center for Jewish
Studies may be relatively new compared to
programs formalized decades ago at other
major public institutions, Carolina scholars
say the future looks bright.
“With the momentum we’ve
developed in the last three years, I don’t
know of other newer Jewish studies
programs that are growing so quickly with
so many new faculty positions in such a
short period,” Hess said.
Ferris said the center, and a growing
campus Hillel program, have created a
synergy. “Suddenly, there is an active
Jewish life on campus intellectually, socially
and spiritually,” she said.
Given response from students, faculty,
alumni and administrators, Ferris predicts
UNC’s Jewish studies program will
become one of the nation’s top programs in
the next decade.
“There is excellence there, and those
partnerships between students, alumni, the
administration and the faculty are really
what makes it work,” she said. •
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 15
the oldest preserved copies of the Hebrew
Bible and related works, which are known
as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Her research
covers Palestine (modern Israel, Jordan and
the Palestinian territories) in the Roman,
Byzantine and early Islamic periods, including
ancient pottery and synagogues, Qumran and
the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Roman Army in
the East.
Her book, Archaeology of Qumran
and the Dead Sea Scrolls was selected as an
Outstanding Academic Book for 2003 by
Choice magazine and won the 2003 Biblical
Archaeology Society’s Award for Best Popular
Book in Archaeology. She also was honored
with the coveted 2006 Irene Levi-Sala Book
Prize in nonfiction for The Archaeology of the
Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine.
She has shared her ability to transform
ancient history into modern day intrigue
with graduate and undergraduate students as
well as with national television audiences for
National Geographic’s “Life of Jesus” Science
of the Bible series and the History Channel’s
Battlefield Detectives’ “Siege of Masada.”
Before coming to Carolina in fall 2002,
Magness was associate professor of classics
and art history at Tufts University and director
of the Archaeology Program. She earned a
bachelor’s degree in archaeology and history
from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in
1977 and a doctorate in classical archaeology
from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989.
At age 14, her ninth-grade yearbook
photo caption read — “Career Goal:
Archaeologist.” Magness has maintained her
youthful focus with a passion.
“Archaeology is my career and my life,”
she said. “What I do is the most interesting
thing in the world. I work all the time, and I
love every minute.” •
The Kenan professorship is one of four
distinguished chairs established in 1995 at
the suggestion of the late Frank H. Kenan, a
1935 Carolina graduate, to help the University
recruit and recognize scholars who excel in
both research and undergraduate teaching.
The family’s William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable
Trust funded the professorships.
Jodi Magness is an adventuress and
author, archaeologist and scholar, researcher
and raconteur. She also is (pun intended)
down to earth.
Just ask her students.
“On digs, in the pre-dawn desert,
Jodi’s energy is infectious and inspiring.
Her knowledge seems endless, and thanks
to her informative lectures, I find myself
intentionally bringing up ancient pottery
trends in daily conversation,” said Thomas
Hopper, a member of the students’
excavation team for the Israel Archaeology
Summer Field School in Yotvata, directed by
Magness in June 2006.
Magness, the Kenan Distinguished
Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early
Judaism at UNC, began her involvement with
the Yotvata site with a tempting invitation
from an Israeli colleague who shares her
fascination with the Roman army, one of her
research interests.
Bart Ehrman, professor and chair of
the religious studies department, wrote in
an award nomination letter that Magness
is “everywhere recognized as one of the
top archaeologists of Palestine in the world
today.”
“The realm of her research as a field
archaeologist ranges from technical areas
such as ceramic analysis to issues of the
social, political and cultural history of
Palestine through the troubled centuries
beginning with the destruction of the Temple
in the 6th century B.C. through the early
Byzantine period.”
The Yotvata dig is literally a work-in-progress,
during which Magness and her
students explored, confirmed and expanded
upon the results of previous excavations
— even as the conflict between Israel
and Lebanon heated up while they were
completing their work there this summer.
This devilishly hot excavation — one of
more than 20 research locations in Israel and
Greece Magness has experienced — took
place on the site of a Roman fort dating to ca.
300 A.D. It is far enough from today’s battles
for Magness and her students to continue
working safely at the site, but they heeded
the State Department warning not to explore
further afield in Israel.
Yotvata is the modern name of an oasis
with saline marshes in Israel’s southern Arava
(rift valley), located 25 miles north of Eilat and
Aqaba on the Red Sea. A stone police station
of the British Mandatory period sits atop the
fort’s remains.
In the 1970s, Zeev Meshel of Tel Aviv
University conducted limited excavations at
Yotvata and found the original 4th century
A.D. occupation level of the fort. In the
mid-1980s, the chance discovery of a Latin
inscription originally set above the main gate
revealed that Priscus, who was probably a
governor of the Syria-Palestina province, built
the fort as part of the reorganization of the
Roman empire’s eastern frontier defenses.
“Our excavations have revealed a more
complex occupational sequence than that
suggested by professor Meshel. We have good
evidence for an early Islamic reoccupation
— 7th to early 8th centuries — as well as a
series of Roman phases,” Magness said.
Field studies will come to fruition in
2007, the fifth year of her commitment to
excavating the site. Magness has planned
a research leave in 2007-08 and intends to
write a final report with the site co-director,
Gwyn Davies of Florida International
University.
As an expert on ancient Palestinian
archaeology, Magness is particularly insightful
about the site of Qumran, which yielded over
900 parchments and fragments constituting
DIGGING IT
Archaeologist Jodi Magness is a leading expert on ancient Palestine
BY JB SHELTON
Jodi Magness in Yotvata
Jim Haberman
16 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
Many Carolina professors excel at both teaching and research.
Joe Lowman and Peter Filene have honed their teaching to a fine art and have used their
research and writing skills to help others understand what works — in and out of the
classroom. They each have been on the UNC faculty for more than 35 years, have been
tapped to teach first-year seminars and have won the University’s most coveted teaching
awards. As master conductors in the classroom, they share a passion for perfecting their craft,
a zeal for learning and an unadulterated love for teaching.
T E R R I F I C T E A C H E R S
B y K i m W e a v e r S p u r r ’ 8 8
TERRIFIC TEACHERS
P E T E R F I L E N E ( l e f t ) a n d J O E L OW M A N s h a r e a l a u g h — a n d a l o v e o f t e a c h i n g
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 17
Psychology
professor Joe Lowman
had no intention of
becoming a teacher. In
fact, the Boone, N.C.
native almost missed
his calling.
In 1970, during
his last year in graduate
school at Carolina,
Lowman spoke to
a class at Durham’s
Jordan High School.
The teacher asked
him where he’d be
teaching next year,
to which Lowman
replied, “Me a teacher?
No way. I’m moving
to Colorado to be a
family therapist.”
The teacher
replied, “Joe, if you do
that, you’ll be missing
your gift. I can’t
imagine you not being
a teacher.”
It turns out
that the position
Lowman agreed to
take in Colorado was
eliminated by the
state legislature. Stuck
with no job, he took
a post as a clinical
supervisor at UNC
that also involved part-time
teaching. A half-hour after finishing the oral defense of his
dissertation, with the “ink not yet dry on his diploma,” Lowman
walked into his first class at Carolina.
That was 36 years ago. And he’s still here.
Lowman has made effective teaching his primary area of
scholarship. He’s taught everything from a graduate course
on college teaching to undergraduate classes in evolutionary
psychology, advanced personality theory and abnormal psychology.
Lowman practices what he preaches. His CV is chock-full
of most of the major teaching awards given at Carolina, including
the 2006 Board of Governors (BOG) Award for Excellence in
Teaching. He has won a Tanner Award and been a Bowman
and Gordon Gray professor, an endowed chair awarded to the
University’s best undergraduate teachers for five-year terms. Senior
psychology majors have given him their teaching award five times.
But winning awards isn’t what it’s all about for Lowman.
“I’m not invested in my teaching so I can win teaching
awards,” said Lowman, who on this day has finished grading 16
of 45 essay exams for one of his spring classes. “That’s not what
it’s about for me.” Lowman admits he gets a little depressed at the
end of every semester; he knows he will miss “the pure pleasure of
talking about psychology with my students.”
In 1984, Lowman wrote a seminal book, Mastering the
Techniques of Teaching. It was updated in 1995, and the publisher
is trying to get him to write a third edition. Translated into
Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic, it was a book that
changed his career. It was written at a time, Lowman acknowledges,
when there was a renewed national interest in improving the
quality of college instruction. In the last 20 years, he’s given more
than 200 presentations on college teaching to faculty in the United
States, Canada and Brazil. He’s written numerous articles and book
chapters on strategies for effective teaching.
In his book, Lowman offers a two-dimensional model of
exemplary college teaching, one that focuses on both the instructor’s
ability to stimulate intellectual excitement in the classroom and his
ability to establish motivating interpersonal rapport with his students.
Judging from comments from his students, Lowman excels
at both dimensions. He says it’s been 20 years since he’s used the
designation “Dr.” Many of his students call him by his first name.
And he takes the time, even in large lecture classes, to learn theirs.
It may help that he’s also an accomplished Appalachian
storyteller. He has told folk tales all over North Carolina and in
Russia, Hungary, Brazil and at the National Storytelling Festival
in Jonesboro, Tenn. He even made his own rocking chair out
of “a quarter round of red oak, thirty days off the stump” that he
sometimes uses when telling stories.
His storyteller business card reads: “Entertainment
Guaranteed.”
“I can remember many instances in which Dr. Lowman has
jumped, skipped and laughed to the amazement of his students
(all in good humor I might add),” said senior history major Justin
Manusov. “Not only can he speak at length about anything in
psychology, he often finds ways to relate the subject matter to
literature, history or biographical information. In a sense, he seems
to have a great knowledge about everything.”
Lowman, a self-proclaimed “student of the human
condition,” says it’s easy to maintain his enthusiasm for teaching
because he’s totally captivated by his subject.
“I’m a student every day. I’m learning, thinking and critically
evaluating every idea I run into,” he said. “I’m always learning new
things and thinking about old things in new ways. I try to connect
everything I talk about in psychology to literature, economics and
the other sciences. I’m totally fascinated by young people, by what
they’re going through at ages 18-22. To me, being engaged in
everything is what education is all about. It’s not living in a silo.”
Indeed, one afternoon while passing out graded essay exams
J O E L OW M A N
continued
TERRIFIC TEACHERS
Steve Exum
18 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
to his advanced personality class, Lowman tells students, “You always
teach me stuff in your papers, and my job is to continue to learn.”
He’s currently reading a series of novels about Botswana called
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. In summer 2007, Lowman is
planning a six-week Burch seminar in Botswana on evolutionary
personality. As part of their time in Africa, students will spend about
a week with the San Bushmen.
Students say Lowman seems to genuinely care whether or not
they learn the material — and that his lectures always seem fresh,
never re-hashed.
“He is always energetic, engaging and empowering,” said
freshman business and Spanish major John Houston. “He prompts
his students to look beyond the mere words on the page and stretch
their minds.”
Lowman’s love of teaching extends to the work he does with
graduate students. Karen Gil, chair of the psychology department,
has known Lowman for 11 years. He was instrumental in setting up
a mentoring program for graduate teaching assistants, “motivating
them to put energy into their teaching,” she said.
Gil calls Lowman a “great departmental citizen” as well
— someone who has taken on a myriad of roles in the psychology
department, from serving as an undergraduate adviser and assistant
dean in the academic advising office to being on the undergraduate
studies committee. He’s served on the undergraduate studies
committee since 1979, “probably the longest term of service of any
faculty member on any psychology department committee,” Gil said.
Lowman has plenty of interests that keep him busy outside the
classroom, but he is most passionate about the tuba.
He started playing the tuba again in 1994 after a 34-year
lapse, having been issued a “beat-up, old corroded sousaphone”
in seventh grade that he brought back to life with silver polish. In
1995, Lowman auditioned for and became a “freshman” member
of the Marching Tar Heels, UNC’s marching band, during which
time he became known fondly as “Dr. Joe.” Lowman no longer
marches with the Tar Heels; today, he plays with the Triangle
Tuba Quartet and Chapel Hill’s Village Band.
He has performed with various choral groups as a bass/
baritone, including the Carolina Blue Barbershop Quartet and
the Triangle Opera Theater, where he sang in the chorus of
“La Traviata.” He’s taking voice lessons. He loves backpacking,
snow skiing and riding his bicycle to campus. He wants to take a
blacksmithing course someday soon.
Sure, he could retire and devote all his time to those interests,
but not while teaching is still so much fun.
Lowman likes to share these words from former Wesley
Foundation campus minister Manuel Workman, who would tell
students: “My job is to help you grow up. Your job is to keep me
from growing old.”
“In that sense,” Lowman added, “it’s easy after 36 years to still
find this fun. The students keep you looking ahead to your life, not
looking back on it.”A
n awards committee once called history
professor Peter Filene a “meta-teacher” for his role in teaching
graduate students how to teach. Peter Coclanis, former history
department chairman, adds his own accolades. He calls his colleague
“the Platonic ideal of an undergraduate teacher” and, knowing
Filene’s love of baseball, “the Cal Ripken of historical pedagogy.”
Still, after awhile, you simply run out of adjectives to
describe him, said Coclanis, the University’s associate provost for
international affairs. He has known Filene for 22 years.
“One of the things that I think has marked Peter Filene as
a great teacher is the fact that he doesn’t have any preconceived
notions or a cookie-cutter mentality about how one can become a
good teacher,” Coclanis said. “He’s constantly looking to recharge
and retool his classes.”
Coclanis said when many teachers might be dreading the
start of a new semester, Filene would say things like: “I can’t sleep
because school is about to start, and I get to meet new students.”
Filene, who’s been teaching at Carolina for 39 years, has kept
registers of his classes, what amounts now to a huge ream of paper,
from the very beginning. He’s spent much of his teaching career
here. Once the piles of paper started growing, Filene said he began
to feel that if he got rid of them, it would be like giving away
family photos.
“Every now and then I have to look up somebody, and
suddenly, there are a bunch of names that take me back to a class or
conversation I had long ago forgotten,” he said.
Try to list the teaching awards Filene has won at UNC, and it
may take a lot of paper. He’s on his second Bowman and Gordon
Gray professorship. He’s won the Tanner award — twice — and
he was given the Board of Governors Award for Excellence in
Teaching in 2002.
Filene grew up in Manhattan. In 11th grade, while walking
in his neighborhood one evening, he had one of those “ah ha”
P E T E R F I L E N E
J O E L OW M A N i s p a s s i o n a t e a b o u t t u b a s
Justin Smith
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 19
moments when he knew he wanted to be a teacher. At the time,
he wasn’t thinking specifically about college teaching, or even
history, but he knew he wanted to pass on his own excitement
about learning.
After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard and teaching briefly
at Lincoln University of Missouri, he applied for a post in UNC’s
history department in 1967. He’d never before been South.
“I came from the airport in St. Louis when it was about 12
degrees in late January, and here it was, one of those 65 degree
days in Chapel Hill,” Filene said. “I thought, ‘Well, let’s try it for a
couple years.’ I kept reading The New York Times, thinking that was
my hometown paper, but pretty soon, it became clear that this was
a good place. And I haven’t regretted it ever.”
Filene teaches and writes primarily on 20th century American
history, with a particular interest in gender, mass media and popular
culture. He has taught a number of U.S. history courses, a graduate
seminar on pedagogy and undergraduate seminars on “Photography
and Modern American Culture” and “Biography as History.”
In 2005, Filene wrote a book, an ode to his profession, called
The Joy of Teaching. He tackles everything from syllabus writing
and lecture planning to class discussions, grading and teacher-student
interactions outside the classroom. He enjoys putting on
his diagnostic hat, he said, and helping graduate students to explore
what’s going on in their classrooms. For 29 years, as head of the
history department’s committee on teaching, he conducted a
training workshop every fall for teaching assistants.
“One of my teaching assistants introduced a Hollywood film
into one of my classes, something that reflected the politics or
culture of the time. After one of the discussions, she said, ‘Why
weren’t the students more responsive?’ I said, ‘You know, I think
you should ask the questions not after the film, but before the film,
so students know what to look for.’ The next time she did that, it
was magic,” Filene said.
But how does he maintain his own joy for the job?
“There are new students every year. I keep reminding myself,
like some actor on Broadway, that it’s the same script, but it’s a new
audience,” Filene said. “And then I try to change the script.” For
instance, he’s re-examining a course on United States history since
the Civil War that he’s taught “for the umpteenth time,” and planning
to make some changes for the fall. Students like variety, he said, just
like “we don’t want grilled cheese sandwiches for every meal.”
Senior history major Jacob Karabell calls Filene “the most
approachable professor that he has had at Carolina,” someone who
values students’ opinions.
“Many older teachers that I’ve taken courses from have
clearly taught their courses for a long time, incorporating few
changes … This could never happen with Professor Filene; he just
likes teaching too much to permit any stagnation,” Karabell said.
“Though he is obviously a brilliant historian, he never comes off as
didactic or superior. He always asked us for ways we thought the
course could run better — and he actually employed our ideas.”
Borrowing a metaphor from the University’s Center for
Teaching and Learning, Filene says teaching should not be like
pitching a baseball toward a student in the batter’s box to see if
he or she hits it or strikes out. Ideally, teaching is like a game of
Frisbee, where a teacher invites students to catch an idea — and
then pass it on.
“The Frisbee succeeds only as long as the Frisbee is in the air.
If you throw it past somebody, or at somebody who drops it, then
you’ve lost. So, we all need to work together to keep the Frisbee in
the air,” Filene said.
Mildred Long caught that “Frisbee” more than 10 years ago
when she was taking Filene’s history of photography class. Now
she’s pursuing a master’s degree in studio art at UNC, with a
concentration in photography.
“He opened my eyes to the world of photography and showed
me images that would, years later, influence my own path in life and
decision to pursue photography more seriously,” Long said.
Filene became interested in photography in the early ’70s when
he got a grant to put together a multimedia show on the Great
Depression. It’s one of his many hobbies. He enjoys experimenting
with abstract photography using double exposures and has had an
art show at the Durham Arts Council. He’s written a novel, Home
and Away, a coming-of-age story set in New York City against the
backdrop of the anti-Communist hysteria of 1951. He’s had short
stories published in literary magazines and is working on a second
novel. He loves commuting to work on his bicycle.
“Diversity is helpful, both physical and mental,” Filene said.
“It’s like a well-rounded diet for the self.”
He’ll have plenty to keep him busy when he decides to retire.
It’s something he’s thought about, starting that next chapter of his life
— but he’d like to teach at least one more year.
“I will probably have much regret about it when school opens,
but nonetheless, I think everything has to come to an end sometime,
even something I love,” Filene said.
Coclanis, the associate provost, says when Filene does retire, it
will be “a real loss to the whole department, the whole University.”
“Not only does he have a passion for teaching, he has talent. …
Peter Filene is in another league from most people.” •
P E T E R F I L E N E s a y s t e a c h i n g i s l i k e F r i s b e e
Steve Exum
20 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
HIGHLIGHTS
FedEx gives
$5 million for Global
Education Center
FedEx Corp. has committed $5
million to support and name the new
global education building that will open
on campus this spring, bringing major
international activities under one roof and
advancing a top academic priority of the
University and the College of Arts and
Sciences.
Construction began in November
2004 for the facility, which will create a
vibrant hub of international studies, research,
teaching, public service and cultural
exchange. The new building is adjacent
to the Carolina Inn at the intersection of
McCauley and Pittsboro streets.
The FedEx Global Education Center
will for the first time house in one place
all international and area studies programs
for the College, including: the Office of
Study Abroad, the African Studies Center,
the Curriculum in International and Area
Studies, Carolina Asia Center, Carolina
Center for the Study of the Middle East
and Muslim Civilizations, Center for Slavic,
Eurasian and East European Studies, Center
for European Studies and the Institute of
Latin American Studies.
The new facility will
also house the University’s
national resource center for
international studies and an
office for international student
and scholar services. Additionally,
the College and the Associate
Provost for International
Affairs will launch a collaborative Global
Research Institute that will provide faculty
and students an opportunity to interact
and study with distinguished scholars from
around the world who are engaged in
seminal international research.
The FedEx Global Education Center
was designed by award-winning architect
Andrea Leers of Leers Weinzapfel, a
Boston-based firm that has garnered an
international reputation for beautiful and
innovative designs.
“This state-of-the-art structure will
encourage faculty, students and visitors from
diverse disciplines and regional interests to
come together to expand their knowledge
of the world and their understanding of
other cultures and nations,” said Madeline
G. Levine, interim dean of the College
and Kenan Professor of Slavic Languages
and Literatures. “The FedEx gift to the
University advances our commitment to
provide an international education to our
students as preparation for their roles as
citizens and future leaders in an increasingly
global society.”
Frederick W. Smith, FedEx chairman,
president and chief executive officer,
said, “The building directly aligns with
our interests in advancing education and
academic programs in the international arena
and will help the University in its efforts to
enhance North Carolina’s ability to thrive in
a global economy.”
“This gift is part of a broader
commitment by FedEx to North Carolina,
its people and its economy,” Smith added.
FedEx operates in more than 200
countries and territories and is planning
to build a company hub in Greensboro,
representing a major investment in North
Carolina.
The launching of the Global Education
Center will help promote a series of special
events throughout 2007 that will emphasize
the University’s and the College’s increasing
focus on internationalization.
Carolina leads all public research
universities for the rate of students
going abroad — 36.7 percent of UNC
undergraduates study in other countries
before they graduate. With the College’s
acquisition last year of the
European Study Center in
Winston House in London,
the University acquired its first
academic property overseas. Other
initiatives include collaborations
with the National University of
Singapore (NUS). The College
and NUS are developing a new international
joint-undergraduate degree program that
is believed to be among the first of its kind
among major public research universities.
The N.C. Higher Education Bond
Referendum, approved in 2000, generated
$22.5 million for the $39 million building.
Private gifts, including the one from FedEx,
are expected to total $7.5 million. •
H I G H L I G H T S
“The building directly aligns with our interests in advancing
education and academic programs in the international arena
and will help the University in its efforts to enhance
North Carolina’s ability to thrive in a global economy.”
— Frederick W. Smith, { FedEx chairman }
ABOVE: The FedEx Global Education Center will open this spring.
Michael O’Beirne
HIGHLIGHTS
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 21
Their
father is a pimp
and crack dealer.
Their mother is a
prostitute serving
a 40-year prison
sentence for
murder. They have
been surrounded
by sex, drugs,
poverty, and verbal and physical abuse their
entire lives.
Music is the chord that holds the lives
of teenagers Angela and Carmen Jones
together. The sisters, residents of the Watts
district in South Central Los Angeles, sing,
write and produce music. But it was UNC
student Courtney Garcia, 3,000 miles away
in Chapel Hill, who gave them their voice.
Garcia graduated in May 2006 with
a degree in communication studies and
creative writing. She culled 60 hours of
videotape of Carmen and Angela’s journey
into a 40-minute documentary called The
Way Out, a haunting tale of their five-month
struggle to break free from their
father.
Garcia had an internship in the
summer of 2005 with a Hollywood
producer. During her days off, the long-time
fan of hip hop music would explore
local spots where kids were rapping and
singing.
While visiting the nonprofit
Subject2Change, Garcia heard Angela and
Carmen sing and was intrigued by their
intelligence and
talent.
The film
includes disturbing
scenes captured
by Angela and
Carmen inside the
house they shared
with their father
and his prostitutes.
Garcia loaned them her camera for two
months so they could film their daily lives.
They captured a cell phone
conversation involving a social worker who
investigated the home, an incident that
resulted in their father’s eventual arrest.
Garcia showed her film at the
International Video Art Festival in
Casablanca, Morocco.
The Hendersonville, N.C. native has
big dreams for the film. She plans to show
it at more festivals and would love to have
network TV exposure.
And her hopes for Angela and Carmen?
“I hope they get an education. I think
an education is the way out for them.” •
Music is the chord that holds the lives
of teenagers Angela and Carmen Jones
together. The sisters, residents of the Watts
district in South Central Los Angeles, sing,
write and produce music. But it was UNC
student Courtney Garcia, 3,000 miles away
in Chapel Hill, who gave [ them their voice. ]
Women who shatter “glass
ceiling” can narrow wage gap
Women who break through the “glass ceiling” into top
management jobs can help narrow the gender wage gap for
nonmanagerial women who work for them, sociologists at UNC
and the University of California, Irvine have found.
The new study reveals that the promotion of women into
management positions may benefit all women — but only
if those female managers reach relatively high-level positions
within managerial hierarchies. It is the first large-scale analysis of its type using national
data on workers and managers.
Study co-authors Philip N. Cohen of UNC and Matt L. Huffman of UCI presented
their findings at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Montreal
in August. The study was featured in The Washington Post, The Seattle Times and by
United Press International, among other media outlets.
The sociologists analyzed 2000 U.S. Census figures, with a sample size of 1.32
million workers in 29,294 local jobs in 1,318 local industries for the study.
“Female managers do matter, but it’s not enough to just have more women in
positions of authority,” Cohen said. “These results suggest they have to be high enough
up in the organization to make a difference for all the women below them. The
presence of high-level female managers has a much larger impact: increasing women’s
wages and decreasing wage inequality by gender.”
The study highlights in a new way the significance of the glass ceiling, Cohen said.
Previous research has focused on access to managerial jobs. This study examined what
happens when women do break through the glass ceiling into upper management.
“Due to the glass ceiling, not only are qualified women potentially blocked from
upper-level management positions — but their absence in upper management has
ripple effects that potentially shape workplace outcomes for nonmanagerial women as
well,” Cohen added. •
Philip Cohen
Courtney Garcia
Student filmmaker documents sisters’ “Way Out”
Justin Smith
PlayMakers names producing artistic director
Joseph
Haj, a Carolina
alumnus with
extensive
theatrical
credits, is the
new producing
artistic director for PlayMakers Repertory
Company, the nonprofit professional theater
company based in the department of
dramatic art.
The 1988 graduate of UNC’s master of
fine arts professional actor training program
will provide artistic vision and guidance,
direct plays, plan programs, select guest
22 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
HIGHLIGHTS
BEIRUT, July 2006 — From
outside, constant bangs crash against
a sunny sky. In a country so used to
gunshots and war, it is difficult to be sure
of the source of the noise.
This time it is fireworks. “They
are celebrating killing the Israelis this
morning,” says Malek Al Salek, the
man I am interviewing for a story on
motorcycle-making.
Brushing this information off as
something that, as a foreigner, I cannot
fully understand, I continue with the
interview. It is not until the next morning,
from my apartment in Hamra, that it sinks
in: foreigner or not — I am involved.
I awake to
unmistakable
crashes shaking
the building.
These were not
celebratory fireworks. I hurry out of bed
to the ninth floor rooftop to find another
resident looking to
the south.
Columns of
smoke arise from
an orange sky. The
other resident, Katia
Swan, explains that
Hariri airport has
been bombed. The
runways had been targeted the previous
morning, but this time they had hit the fuel
tanks creating flames visible for miles.
An even louder series of explosions
follows and we instinctively grab onto
each other, eyes remaining fixed on the
destruction in the distance.
Over the
next few days
the bombings
become almost
commonplace, at
times barely warranting acknowledgement.
The closer explosions still incite a surprised
flinch, but for the most part people here
have become numbed — but numbed
only to the noise of the explosions. The
resulting devastation to the people is
impossible to dull out. •
Stephanie Preston, an international
studies major from South Salem, N.Y., was
nearing the completion of a photojournal-ism
internship at The Daily Star in Beirut,
when the conflict between Israel and Lebanon
escalated. She kept taking photos of the war’s
impact until she was safely evacuated to Cyprus
on July 22. She is in Xiamen, China this fall
studying economics and Chinese.
Beirut Dispatch
By Stephanie Preston ’08
directors and artists, and raise funds for
PlayMakers, where he has been a guest
director three times. He also will train
graduate dramatic art students in acting and
technology through the professional theater.
Haj has worked in Berlin, Edinburgh,
Paris, Salzburg, Venice and Japan, as well
as in regional theaters across the United
States. He received a National Endowment
for the Arts Millennium Grant, awarded to
50 of America’s finest artists in 2000, and
the 2004-2005 National Endowment for the
Arts/Theatre Communications Group Career
Development Grant for Directors.
Other accomplishments include
conducting workshops with Palestinian and
Israeli actors in the West Bank and Gaza,
directing Henry V with maximum-security
inmates in California, and creating and
directing Voices with members of the rural
community of Batesburg-Leesville, S.C.
Haj succeeds David Hammond, who
has been with PlayMakers for 21 years,
the past 14 seasons as artistic director.
Hammond will become artistic director
emeritus and devote more time to teaching.
He also will advise PlayMakers and teach
dramatic art at UNC and in the graduate
acting program of New York University’s
Tisch School of the Arts. •
Over the next few days the bombings
become almost commonplace, at times
barely warranting [ acknowledgement. ]
Joseph Haj
Stephanie Preston in Beirut
HIGHLIGHTS
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 23
Distinguished professorship was a triple surprise
Richard Krasno attended the post-commencement
ceremony in May for the
curriculum in peace, war and defense in
UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences because
he wanted to help his friends Don and Betsy
Dixon celebrate the graduation of their son
Peter.
Krasno, executive director of the William
R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust and president
of the four affiliated William R. Kenan, Jr.
funds, was pleasantly surprised to hear then
Dean Bernadette Gray-Little announce that
a new distinguished professorship was being
established for the interdisciplinary academic
program that explores issues of human
conflict, national and global security, and
defense.
Krasno understood that endowed
chairs are critical for recruiting and keeping
outstanding professors, and he had been
instrumental in helping to raise funds for
that purpose.
One pleasant surprise led to two
others: Gray-Little went on to announce
that the Dixons had given a major gift to
endow the new faculty chair and it would be
named the Richard M. Krasno Distinguished
Professorship. The Dixons’ gift of $666,000
will be matched by $334,000 in funds
from the state’s Distinguished Professors
Endowment Trust Fund to create a $1 million
professorship.
“Through our long-term friendship,
Dick Krasno has made me aware of the
importance of endowed professorships
because they allow the University to attract
and retain top-notch teachers and scholars,”
said Don Dixon. “Dick is in the business
of giving away endowed professorships. I
thought — what better way to honor my
friend than endowing a professorship at
Carolina in his name.”
Dixon is co-founder and managing
director of Trident Capital, an equity and
venture capital firm based in Palo Alto.
Prior to joining the Kenan Trust, Krasno
was president of the Monterey Institute
of International Studies in California, and
president and chief executive officer of the
Institute of International Education in New
York. He also served as deputy assistant
secretary of education in Washington, D.C.
and as an officer of the Ford Foundation.
Krasno serves on a number of corporate
and nonprofit boards and is a director of
UNC Health Care. He holds a Ph.D. from
Stanford University. •
Reeves Foundation urges alumni
to support young teacher-scholars
Students of the late Bernard Boyd
say he was more than just a professor of
religious studies at Carolina. He was an
inspiration, a teacher and scholar whose
skill in the classroom was matched only by
the wise advice he offered to students in
guiding their future careers.
Former student Stephen P. Oliver ’70,
managing director of Calibre, a company
that specializes in multi-generational wealth
management, said Boyd’s classes
were popular among students.
Oliver signed up for all of Boyd’s
classes.
“His electives were at the top
of the list, and he pulled in students
from all disciplines, not just religious
studies,” Oliver said. “He was a
legacy, an icon who had an impact
across the whole University.”
The Bernard Boyd Graduate Student
Fellowship, named by students in his honor,
will help attract an outstanding graduate
student in religious studies to Carolina
through a competitive financial award.
The Boyd Fellowship is just one
example of graduate support that helps
attract promising students to the College
and strengthens the University’s tradition
of creating the next generation of scholars
and teachers. In recent years, competition for
the best and brightest graduate students has
become fierce. Fellowships and other forms
of financial support are often the determining
factor in a student’s decision to stay at
Carolina.
To support graduate students, the Reeves
Foundation, a New Jersey-based family
philanthropy with strong Carolina ties, is
offering a new challenge. If alumni contribute
a total of $600,000 to endowed graduate
student support through Dec. 31, the Reeves
Foundation will create a new $300,000
graduate student fellowship in the College.
For more information on supporting graduate
students, contact the Arts and Sciences Foundation,
134 E. Franklin St., Chapel Hill, N.C. 27514,
(919) 962-0108. •
A graduate student fellowship honors the memory of religious
studies professor Bernard Boyd, shown near Arad, Israel, in 1965.
Ruel Tyson
HIGHLIGHTS
At the June 2006 celebration of his
almost 20 years directing the Institute for the
Arts and Humanities in UNC’s College of
Arts and Sciences, Ruel Tyson looked at his
watch and decided it was getting late; too late
to read the eight-page speech he had spent
two weeks preparing.
“When it came my turn, it was some-thing
like twenty of eleven, and I knew we
had all been sitting a long time,” Tyson said.
His love of writing and thinking led
Tyson to write those eight pages, but his
practical side made him decide to read just
the last one.
James Peacock, Kenan Distinguished
Professor of Anthropology, who has done
field work with Tyson, compares him to
the German thinker Goethe, who was a
poet but also a minister of
state. Like Goethe, Tyson
is a man of both word and
deed, Peacock said. “His
creating and administering
the institute is an example of that.”
His gaze intense even behind his large
glasses, Tyson seems to read people and
situations as closely as he reads the quotations
he loves. In the summer of 1986, he read
his colleagues’ “terrifically low morale” and
decided to do something about it.
“There was already a crisis with us, in
that era, about keeping our best people,”
Tyson said. “We were picking brilliant
young scholars and teachers at the assistant
professorship level, working with them for
six years. They would get tenure, and then
Columbia would come along and offer them
double the salary.”
Tyson asked a few colleagues to bring
their lunches once a week and talk. “The first
couple of weeks, we griped and lamented
and complained,” he said. “In the third and
fourth weeks, we really got down to what
we thought would be some of the answers
to our problems.”
At the sixth meeting, then-Dean of
the College of Arts and Sciences Gillian
Cell accepted the group’s invitation to join
them. “She came with her yellow pad and
her bag lunch,” Tyson says. Cell ended up
appointing a larger committee. By the next
summer, an on-campus fellowship program,
then called the program for the arts and
humanities, had became reality. “I think the
budget was $10,000,” Tyson said.
Tyson and others continued to raise
additional funds, through private gifts, for
fellowships that gave faculty time to develop
both their research and teaching projects.
Those first fellows found that not only
did the research leave give them a chance to
recharge, but their time around the table with
other fellows helped them make unexpected
connections.
“Three of them worked in German
language materials, all in a different
department, and when they discovered each
other, instant community was born,” Tyson
said. “That was the kind of thing that began
happening over and over again.”
Under Tyson’s leadership, the institute
has supported almost 400 faculty fellows
and moved into Hyde Hall, the handsome
facility completed in 2002, carefully designed
to blend with its historic surroundings on
McCorkle Place.
This year, Tyson has handed the
directorship of the Institute for the Arts and
Humanities over to English scholar John
McGowan, who will also hold the new
Ruel W. Tyson Jr. Distinguished Professor-ship
funded in Tyson’s honor.
After 39 years at the Uuniversity, Tyson
hasn’t given up teaching, and will resume
classes in fall 2007 after a research leave. An
avid walker, he’s been experimenting with
incorporating physical activity into his ethics
classes. It started with his asking sleepy-eyed
students in an 8 a.m. class to
get up and stretch. Now he
has his personal trainer talk
with students about sitting,
standing and walking, and
he assigns them to take a 30-minute walk
(without an iPod or other technology), then
write about what they felt, heard and saw.
“I can’t talk to them about ethics unless they
have a sense of themselves and other people
and the world,” he said.
It’s easy to see why Tyson’s students
often stay in touch, visiting him and his wife
Martha at their home. John W. Burress,
a former member of the institute’s board
and one of the supporters of the Tyson
professorship, considers Tyson a friend as well
as a colleague.
“You can have lunch with Ruel for
two hours, and it seems like an hour,” Burress
said. “You always leave a conversation with
Ruel feeling like you’ve learned something.
And you always leave with a smile.” •
—Learn more about the institute online at
www.iah.unc.edu.
Under Tyson’s leadership, the institute has supported almost 400 faculty fellows
and moved into Hyde Hall, the handsome facility completed in 2002,
carefully designed to blend with its historic surroundings on McCorkle Place. [ ]
24 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
Legacy of Leadership
Ruel Tyson steps down as first director of the Institute
for the Arts and Humanities
By Angela Spivey
Steve Exum
HIGHLIGHTS
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 25
Nurturing Academic Leaders
$5 million Hyde gift will support new generation
of University leaders
By Kim Weaver Spurr ’88
Barbara Hyde hopes the expansion
of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities’
Academic Leadership Program will help
develop “the next generation of Ruel
Tysons” — dedicated academic leaders who
want to stay at Carolina and help shape its
future.
Tyson, the first director of the institute
in the College of Arts and Sciences, stepped
down in summer 2006 after being at the
helm for nearly 20 years. (See story, page 24.)
“Teaching has always been at the core
of what Ruel does. Now he’s applied his
intellect and curiosity to make the University
a better place,” said Hyde. “Ruel sets the
table for conversations, brings together the
right ingredients, steps back, stirs the pot
and makes it happen. I’m hoping that this
program will multiply the ‘Ruels’ on campus
and support the ones already there.”
Hyde, who earned a bachelor’s degree
with a double major in English and religious
studies in 1983, and her husband, Pitt, a 1965
alumnus, have pledged $5 million to endow
and name the Ruel W. Tyson Academic
Leadership Program. It is the largest single gift
to the institute and a key gift to the College.
Barbara Hyde is president of the J.R. Hyde
III Family Foundation and director of the
J.R. Hyde Sr. Foundation of Memphis,
Tenn. She also chairs the institute’s advisory
board and serves on UNC’s Board of
Trustees.
Hyde took several religious studies
courses under Ruel Tyson as an undergradu-ate.
After graduation from Carolina and a
year away, she came back to the University
as a development officer and got to know
Tyson when “the institute was just a twinkle
in his eye.” Later, as the executive director of
the Arts and Sciences Foundation, she helped
Tyson to raise the money to get the institute
launched. After she left the University, Tyson
invited her to serve on the
institute’s board. And she and
her husband, Pitt, gave the
lead gift to build the institute
a new home in 2002 — in
Hyde Hall on McCorkle Place.
“There are few people outside of one’s
family whose impact you can trace on your
life over multiple decades,” Hyde said. “All
of us who love and support the University
had at least one of those teachers in our lives
who helped to get the intellectual spark
going. Ruel was that teacher for me. In some
ways, Ruel has guided my own personal
leadership program. The beauty of Ruel is
that he’s done that for so many other people,
both inside and outside of the University.
He has that magic touch of combining the
intellectual vigor and excitement of a great
teacher and his personal warmth and charisma
with an ability to build connections with
people.”
The Hydes’ $5 million gift will allow
for expansion of the Academic Leadership
Program, which prepares faculty for
academic, intellectual and institutional
leadership roles at the University and provides
ongoing support for faculty who have
assumed such positions.
Since the program’s inception in 2002,
42 leadership fellows have benefited from the
program.
Fellows participate in a semester-long
seminar where they discuss critical issues
facing the University and faculty members’
participation in University life. They undergo
a week of leadership training at the Center for
Creative Leadership in Greensboro and par-ticipate
in two overnight retreats focused on
career development, leadership skills assess-ment
and personal vision. They continue to
meet as an ongoing forum of fellows, where
they offer mutual support to each other.
Jack Boger was a faculty member for
16 years before becoming dean of the UNC
School of Law in June 2006. He participated
in the Academic Leadership Program in spring
2003.
Boger said the opportunity to come
together for reflection with faculty from
different disciplines was important.
“It knits you to the Carolina fabric even
more tightly. … We talked a lot about the
life cycle of faculty members and the different
stages of one’s participation in University life,”
he said. “We would talk about particular issues
that had arisen in our own work and reflect
on them collectively.”
The Hydes’ gift will make possible the
next generation of the Academic
Leadership Program in the College. New
leadership initiatives include a program for
faculty who are department chairs and a
program for new faculty. The expansion of
the program also will allow for continuing
career development for faculty and a future
leadership program for senior administrators.
John McGowan, the new director of
the institute, is particularly excited about
the programs for faculty chairs and new
faculty. McGowan, the Ruel W. Tyson Jr.
Distinguished Professor, will have a chance
to participate in the Academic Leadership
Program himself in spring 2007.
“We like the idea of bringing young
faculty in for an extended period of time, so
that they can then form a support group with
people in other departments, but it will also
give them a chance to know this University
— because we hire people from all across the
country.” •
Barbara Hyde says Ruel Tyson was an inspiration to many.
Steve Exum
26 • FALL 2006 • CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES
COLLEGE BOOKSHELF C O L L E G E B O O K S H E L F
A N E X C E R P T
EDITOR’S NOTE:
From At Canaan’s
Edge by Taylor Branch.
Reprinted by permission
of Simon & Schuster,
Inc. New York. The
culmination of Branch’s
stunning three-part
biography of Martin
Luther King, covers one
of the most tumultuous
periods of modern U.S
history, 1965-68. The
author spent those
years at UNC, where
he earned a B.A. in political science and history
and began campaigning for Eugene McCarthy.
This excerpt opens on March 7, 1965, as 600
voting rights petitioners are beaten and tear
gassed while attempting to cross the Edmund
Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., a televised turning
point in the civil rights movement. Copyright
© 2006 by Taylor Branch.
Down the Pettus Bridge before John
Lewis and Hosea Williams opened a vista of
forbidding reception. In the middle distance,
a wall of trooper cruisers blocked all four lanes
of Highway 80. Closer, a reserve of some 150
troopers, sheriff’s deputies, and possemen
mingled behind a front line of 25 troopers
about 200 yards beyond the foot of the bridge
— the possemen in khaki jackets and white
helmets, 15 of them mounted on horseback,
the troopers in blue uniforms and blue
helmets. Scores of white spectators jammed
the parking lot of “Chicken Treat, Home of
the Mickey Burger,” some standing on parked
cars, across the highway from several dozen
Negroes who gathered cautiously behind an
old school bus. Near the front line, outside
the showroom of Lehman Pontiac, troopers
guarded an observation area reserved for
journalists and several of the 20 FBI observers
scattered around Selma....
What the cameras recorded as Williams
and Lewis continued methodically down
President Lyndon Baines Johnson celebrates the
signing of the Voting Rights Act, Aug. 6, 1965,
with Martin Luther King and, to his right,
Ralph Abernathy.
(Congress renewed the act this summer
as parts of it were set to expire.)
Photo by Yoichi R. Okamoto, courtesty of LBJ Library.
Bloody Sunday
in Selma
By Taylor Branch ’68
the slope was an eerie silence, broken by the
snorting of horses. After they had covered
roughly a hundred yards of level ground,
a quietly spoken order ahead introduced
unnerving new sights and sounds to the
marchers: snapping noises that swept along
the barrier line ahead as officers secured
otherworldly gas masks of bug-eyed goggles
and elongated rubber snouts. Williams and
Lewis halted the march line at a separation
of 50 feet when an unmasked trooper
stepped forward with a bullhorn. “It would
be detrimental to your safety to continue this
march,” said Major John Cloud, a scholarly-looking
deputy to Al Lingo. “And I’m saying
that this is an unlawful assembly. You are to
disperse. You are ordered to disperse. Go
home or go to your church. This march will not
continue. Is that clear to you? I’ve got nothing
further to say to you.”
“May we have a word with the major?”
asked Williams. Without amplification, his voice
was barely audible to the journalists nearby.
“There is no word to be had,” replied
Cloud. He gave the marchers two minutes
to withdraw, and the lines faced each other
silently in front of Haisten’s Mattress and
Awning Company. Lewis and Williams looked
straight ahead, wearing light and dark raincoats,
respectively, each with a buttoned tab collar
pushing forward his necktie. Behind Lewis, Bob
Mants stood motionless in an overcoat and
collegiate scarf, wearing “high-water pants” that
were stylish on the Atlanta University campuses,
stopping five inches above the ankle. Behind
Williams stood Albert Turner in rural denim,
carrying a stuffed backpack that evidenced the
hope of the Perry County marchers to sustain
themselves all the way to Montgomery. Mants
and Turner wore the jaunty Sluggo cap, also
known as the Big Apple hat.
After one minute and five seconds, Major
Cloud addressed his front unit without the
bullhorn: “Troopers, advance.” The blue line of
elephantine masks moved forward with slow,
irregular steps, overlapping and concentrating
to curl around the front ranks of marchers.
CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES • FALL 2006 • 27
COLLEGE BOOKSHELF
B O O K B R I E F S
• The Inner Islands: A Carolinian’s Sound Country Chronicle (UNC Press) by
Bland Simpson, photography by Ann Cary Simpson. By combining oral history,
autobiography and travel narrative, the author explores some of eastern North Carolina’s
least-known special places. Simpson is director of the creative writing program and a
Tony Award-winning musician with The Red Clay Ramblers string band.
• Russia’s Sputnik Generation (Indiana University Press) by Donald J. Raleigh. Born
in 1949 and 1950, they were first-graders when the USSR launched Sputnik and had
reached middle-age during the Gorbachev revolution. Eight Saratov “baby boomers”
candidly discuss historic events, the transition to post-communism and their everyday
lives with the Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor of History.
• Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics (Cambridge
University Press) by James A. Stimson. The Raymond Dawson Distinguished Professor
of Political Science, a widely recognized expert on the impact of public opinion,
discusses how governments rise and fall when public views shift. This highly readable
paperback edition integrates 50 years of opinion research.
• Peter, Paul & Mary Magdalene (Oxford University Press) by Bart D. Ehrman. In
previous works, the acclaimed expert on early Christianity debunked the DaVinci
Code and revealed how Jesus was often misquoted and misunderstood. Now Ehrman,
the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, provides a lively
exploration of the myths and facts surrounding Christ’s best known followers.
• The Encyclopedia of North Carolina (UNC Press) edited by William S. Powell. This
first single-volume reference to the events, institutions and forces that have shaped
the state includes some 400 photographs and maps, and more than 2,000 entries from
550 scholars, librarians, journalists and others. It’s a people’s compendium compiled
by the history professor emeritus whom the Raleigh News & Observer called a “living
repository of information on all things North Carolinian.”
• Shinemaster (Carnegie Mellon University Press) by Michael McFee. The poet and
creative writing professor’s seventh collection presents the paradox of plenitude amidst
scarcity in playful and poignant ways, with poems about sweet potatoes, popular music,
spitwads, sex education, Sunday school, belching, a shoeshine kit and more.
• Finishing Touches (Tryon Publishing Co., Chapel Hill) by Michael Chitwood.
This creative writing instructor’s latest collection includes essays on a brother-in-law’s
pumpkin business and the death of bluegrass legend Bill Monroe, as well as fiction
tales about a hairless tattooed dog and an ailing Pulitzer Prize-winning professor who is
visited in the hospital by Jesus.
• Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life (University of Chicago
Press) by Andrew J. Perrin. Effective citizenship in a democracy requires much more
than voting and writing letters to the editor. Through interviews with a range of citizen
activists, the assistant professor of sociology shows that healthy democracies rely on
creative thinking, talking and active participation in civic life. •
With nightsticks held chest high, parallel to
the ground, the troopers pushed into the well-dressed
formation, which sagged for nearly
four suspended seconds until the whole mass
burst to the rear, toppling marchers with
accelerating speed as troopers hurtled over
and through them. Almost instantly, silence
gave way to a high-pitched shriek like the war
cry of Indians in Hollywood movies, as the
march line screamed and white spectators
thrilled, some waving encouragement
alongside the charge. Lewis shot out of the
mass at an angle, leaning oddly as he sank to
the ground in five steps, felled by a truncheon
blow to the head. A clattering of horses’
hooves on pavement signaled the general
deployment of Alabama reserves and raised
the volume of the pulsing shrill yell. Two
troopers in the forward tangle stumbled over
bodies into a heap and came up swinging
clubs. The sharp report of guns sounded twice
on the first launch of tear gas, one round
reportedly fired by Sheriff Clark himself. A
canister landed behind a moving wave of
chaos that had not yet registered all the way
back up Pettus Bridge toward Selma, where
some marchers in the distance still knelt in
prayer as instructed.
From the tangle in the foreground, a
Negro woman came spilling out to the side,
pursued by one masked trooper and struck by
two others she passed. Three ducking Negro
men crossed toward nowhere with an injured
woman they carried by arms and a leg, her
undergarments flapping. Horsemen and
masked officers on foot chased marchers who
tried to escape down along the riverbank,
herding them back. The cloud of tear gas
from canister and spray darkened toward the
mouth of the bridge, obscuring all but the
outlines of a half-dozen figures on the ground
and scattered nightsticks in the air. •
Taylor Branch has donated his notes,
drafts and recorded interviews for the King
trilogy to UNC’s Southern Historical Collection
in Wilson Library.
HONOR ROLL H O N O R R O L L 2 0 0 6
Thank You!
The College of Arts and Sciences gratefully
thanks the more than 12,000 donors who
supported its students, faculty and programs
in fiscal year 2005-2006. Every charitable
gift made to the College strengthens its
213-year-old tradition of educating students
in the arts, humanities and sciences.
The 2006 Honor Roll recognizes donors whose
gifts to the College of Arts and Sciences between
July 1, 2005, and June 30, 2006, qualify them
for membership in the following giving societies:
• Chancellors’ Circle — $10,000 and above
• Carolina Society — $5,000 to $9,999
• 1793 Society — $2,000 to $4,999
• Dean’s Circle — $1,500 to $1,999
Young Alumni Levels
Classes 1991 to 1995: $1,000 and above
Classes 1996 to 2000: $500 and above
Classes 2001 to 2005: $250 and above
In academic year 2006, 1,055 donors made
gifts to the College at the Dean’s Circle level
or higher, providing the College with vital
resources for creating and maintaining a
first-rate academic experience at Carolina.
The Honor Roll does not include bequests
or other planned gifts to the College.
Furthermore, it omits the 48 anonymous
donors. This list has been prepared with
great care to ensure its accuracy. To report a
mistake, please contact Tina CoyneSmith at
(919) 962-1682 or tina.coynesmith@unc.edu.
Thank you, once again, for generously
supporting the College of Arts and Sciences
at Carolina!
CHANCELLORS’ CIRCLE ($10,000 and above)
• Nancy Robertson Abbey, San Francisco, CA
• Jamey Aebersold, New Albany, IN
• Renee Dobbins Anderson and Ivan V. Anderson Jr.,
Charleston, SC
• Fay Aronson-Foglia, Coral Gables, FL
• Mr. and Mrs. Thomas W. Beasley, Burns, TN
• Laura Hobby Beckworth, Houston, TX
• McKay and Nina Belk, Charlotte, NC
• Philip D. Bennett, London, UK
• Gilchrist B. Berg, Jacksonville, FL
• Dan and Ann Bernstein, Bronxville, NY
• Dr. and Mrs. Robert H. Bilbro, Raleigh, NC
• Laszlo Birinyi Jr., Southport, CT
• Mr. and Mrs. William J. Blair III,
Wrightsville Beach, NC
• Peter and Heather Boneparth, Lawrence, NY
• Mr. and Mrs. Edwin B. Borden Jr., Goldsboro, NC
• Michael L. Boyatt, Beech Mountain, NC
• Estate of Harry G. Brainard*, Chapel Hill, NC
• Stephen G. Brantley, M.D., Tampa, FL
• William S. Brenizer, Glen Head, NY
• Amy Woods Brinkley, Charlotte, NC
• Vaughn and Nancy Bryson, Vero Beach, FL
• Mr. and Mrs. John W. Burress III,
Winston-Salem, NC
• Sunny Harvey and R. Lee Burrows Jr., Atlanta, GA
• Timothy S. Cage, New York, NY
• Estate of Gwendolyn Burton Caldwell*, Atlanta, GA
• Estate of John B. Carroll*, Fairbanks, AK
• Susan S. Caudill and W. Lowry Caudill,
Durham, NC
• Mr. Max C. Chapman Jr., New York, NY
• Mr. and Mrs. James T. Cheatham III, Chapel Hill, NC
• Mark P. Clein, Chevy Chase, MD
• Munroe and Becky Cobey, Greenwich, CT
• Huddy and Jerry Cohen, Chapel Hill, NC
• Harvey Colchamiro, Greensboro, NC
• Robert F. and Helen H. Conrad, Hillsborough, NC
• Vicki U. and David F. Craver, Cos Cob, CT
• Joseph Marvin Crews, Wilmington, NC
• Steve Cumbie and Druscilla French, Vienna, VA
• Hildegarde O.R. Dahl, Point Pleasant Beach, NJ
• Dr. Lucy C. Daniels, Raleigh, NC
• Harriet Osment Davis, Aurora, CO
• Janet Louise Davis, Wilmette, IL
• Jean L. and James L. Davis, New Bern, NC
• Mr. and Mrs. Arthur St. Clair DeBerry, Durham, NC
• Mary Anne and Alan T. Dickson, Charlotte, NC
• Don and Betsy Dixon, Atherton, CA
• Robin Richards Donohoe, San Francisco, CA
• Palmer and Joe Dorn, Washington, DC
• Steven S. and Katherine S. Dunlevie, Atlanta, GA
• Martha Scott and Craig Prescott Dunlevie,
Atlanta, GA
• Eli N. Evans, New York, NY
• Alan S. and Gail Margolis Fields, Lexington, MA
• David Gardner Frey Jr., Ann Arbor, MI
• Henry and Molly Froelich, Charlotte, NC
• Duvall Schultz Fuqua, Atlanta, GA
• Beth Lloyd and J. Brooke Gardiner,
Mountainside, NJ
• J. Alston Gardner and Barbara Lee, Carbondale, CO
• Olivia Ratledge Gardner, Atlanta, GA
• Lawrence L. and Carol G. Gellerstedt, Atlanta, GA
• Timothy Martin and Cosby Wiley George,
Greenwich, CT
• Leonard Goodman, New York, NY
• Jerome W. Gottesman, Morristown, NJ
• Sally Gottesman, New York, NY
• Peter T. and Laura M. Grauer, Greenwich, CT
• Frances Carrington Gravely, Chapel Hill, NC
• Lee Stevens Gravely, Rocky Mount, NC
• Susan Everett Gravely, Chapel Hill, NC
• Andy and Cindi Griffith, Manteo, NC
• Julia Sprunt Grumbles, Atlanta, GA
• Katherine Smith Gunter, Chapel Hill, NC
• Harriette Jordan and John W. Gussenhoven,
Naples, FL
• Robert H. Hackney Jr. and Shauna Holiman,
Old Greenwich, CT
• Frank T. Hamilton III, Cincinnati, OH
• Henry Haywood Hamilton III, Katy, TX
• Benjamin C. Hammett, Palo Alto, CA
• Anthony S. and Hope Harrington, Easton, MD
• John and Deborah Harris, Charlotte, NC
• Jeffrey Hayden and Eva Marie Saint, Los Angeles, CA
• Leonard and Rose Herring, North Wilkesboro, NC
• William T. Hobbs II and Elizabeth Gilman Hobbs,
Charlotte, NC
• William H. Hofheimer, Richmond, VA
• Jerry Leo Horner Jr., Raleigh, NC
• Charles Michael van der Horst, Chapel Hill, NC
• Roger van der Horst, Raleigh, NC
• Sonja van der Horst*, Chapel Hill, NC
• Frederick S. and Charlotte B. Hubbell, Wassenaar, NL
• Barbara S. and Jaroslav F. Hulka, Chapel Hill, NC
• Alfred Phillips Van Huyck, Round Hill, VA
• Barbara R. and Pitt Hyde, Memphis, TN
• Lynn Buchheit Janney and Stuart Symington Janney,
Butler, MD
• Charles Marion Johnson III, Richmond, VA
• George H. and Janet J. Johnson, Atlanta, GA
• Ben M. Jones III, Naples, FL
• Lyle V. Jones, Pittsboro, NC
• William R. and Jeanne H. Jordan, Fayetteville, NC
• Fred N. Kahn, Asheville, NC
• Frank* and Betty Kenan, Chapel Hill, NC
• Thomas S. Kenan III, Chapel Hill, NC
• Willis and Nancy King, Summit, NJ
• David F. Kirby and Evelyn Debnam Kirby, Raleigh, NC
• Courtney Horner and James W. Kluttz Sr.,
Winston-Salem, NC
• Mary Noel and William M. Lamont Jr., Dallas, TX
• Estate of Virgil Jackson Lee*, Delray Beach, FL
• Seymour and Carol Levin, Greensboro, NC
• Elizabeth Stewart and N. Thompson Long,
Fox Point, WI
• Estate of Frances Marley*, McLean, VA
• Sarah Robbins Mars, Morristown, NJ
• Karen Louise Greenberg and Joseph M. McConnell,
London, UK
• David and Christine McSpadden,