Spring 2015 Issue

Miranda Chien-Hale is a Californian who has been living in the Walltown neighborhood of Durham, North Carolina for two years. She has barely spoken to her neighbors ... until now. Produced for The Short Audio Documentary course taught by John Biewen at the Center for Documentary Studies.

 

Moviemaker Robert Yeoman '73As a child growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Robert Yeoman was fascinated by movies.“There was no Internet, no cable TV. So going to the movie theater was a big event,” said Yeoman, the acclaimed cinematographer who returned to campus as the keynote speaker for Duke Entertainment Media and Arts Network (DEMAN) Weekend last fall. “I loved westerns. I loved comedies. I got into Alfred Hitchcock...that always stayed with me.”But making a career out of making movies was not in his original plan.

Stuart Jones is the former ambassador of Jordan and was the deputy chief of mission in Baghdad from 2010 to 2011. As a career diplomat, he has been stationed all over the world— including in Egypt, Turkey, Colombia, and El Salvador. President Barack Obama nominated  Jones as ambassador to Iraq in May 2014. Jones and his wife, Barbara, are the parents of two Duke students: Thad, a senior, and Dorothy, a sophomore.Who inspired you to enter the Foreign Service, and what keeps you going in the job?

Walltown natives keep their creation story handy like a lucky old coin, proof of their hard-won fortune and untarnished pride. “Old man Wall’s house,” they say knowingly, gesturing toward Onslow Street, formerly Third Street, and before that Wall Street, to the spot where the first house in these parts was built more than a century ago.

High in the foothills of the Himalayas, after an hourslong trek up the hillside, Lisa Philippone and her fellow researchers finally reached the village. “It was just so crazy because you’re hiking, it’s so steep, it’s pouring rain all over us, and we get to the top and this little old lady is there, and she’s cooking on her stove,” remembers Philippone, a master’s student in the Duke Global Health Institute. She spent five months in Uttarakhand, India, last summer bringing new cookstoves to households.

With an annual operating revenue of $2.6 billion, more than 16,000 employees, and a medical-center campus that includes ninety-eight buildings on 201 acres with more than 9,000 employees, the Duke University Health System is the biggest part of Duke, by far. Beginning April 1, A. Eugene Washington will lead the vast enterprise, when he steps in as chancellor for health affairs and president and CEO of the health system.

In less than a week, Duke made decisions that were criticized and praised and launched a national and campus discussion about religious pluralism and the chapel’s role. After an announcement that the traditional Muslim call to prayer would be broadcast weekly from the top of the chapel, the university reconsidered the decision and moved to an alternative approach.

After nearly thirty years in the field, cultural anthropologist Rich Freeman has observed more than a hundred rites of spirit possession, especially in his field study area in southwest India. Now students can catch a glimpse of these elaborate initiations in this course, an interdisciplinary brew of religion, cultural anthropology, and history. A visiting professor of history and religious studies, Freeman first launched the seminar at the University of Michigan and brought it to Duke in 2009.

I’m writing this column the day after a remarkable event. Each winter, the National Football Foundation holds a banquet to honor outstanding achievement associated with that sport—and this year, Duke claimed three honorees. Vice president and director of athletics Kevin White received the John L. Toner Award for excellence in athletics administration. An alumnus of the School of Medicine, Tom Catena M.D.

What makes a flower grow? And why does it grow to begin with? These kinds of questions intrigued Paul Henne when he was a kid growing up in Waterbury, Connecticut. He later discovered that philosophy could help him critically explore his endless queries.

The White House has emphasized strengthening high-school counseling in its campaign to expand college access. Duke answered that call to action last spring, becoming the twenty-fourth higher-education institution to establish a chapter of the College Advising Corps (CAC), a nonprofit organization that aims to increase post-secondary enrollment among low-income and minority students by placing recent college graduates at underserved high schools to serve as full-time advisers.

How did you become interested in the history of torture?As a graduate student, I worked on the history of the Inquisition in Venice. The Inquisition did not use torture frequently, but when it did put someone to torture, it recorded the entire event— including the screams. And that always haunted me, that there was this record of suffering.How long is the history of torture?

Duke wrestling coach Glen Lanham had a question for his newest wrestler: “Fowler, what do you have in that shoebox?” The shoebox contained all of Brendan Fowler’s wrestling gear. A former Blue Devil lacrosse star, he’d been using it for two weeks during summer training, not wanting to ruffle any of his new teammates’ feathers by taking anybody’s locker.“That was huge to me,” Lanham says. “It wasn’t about, ‘Hey Coach, when am I going to get a locker?’ It was about, ‘I’m going to come in here, I don’t want to offend anybody, I’m going to work hard.’”

Duke alumni involved in global health and social entrepreneurship are guiding students in an ambitious challenge to end the largest Ebola outbreak in history.

In the University Archives, we often get research questions about family members who attended Duke. Using yearbooks, photographs, and other resources, we can provide a general sketch of a person—he was a member of this fraternity, she lived in this dormitory. What’s missing is a rich description of the person herself. Did she enjoy school? Did he have lots of friends? What was she really like?