Summer 2015 Issue

Kailey Johnson, Julia Donnell, and Jasmine Hill live in Brown Residence Hall.

FEATURED BOOKMy Generation: Collected Nonfiction features thirty-three pieces by William Styron ’47, some previously unpublished and several taken from Styron’s papers in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke. Here is why the editor James L.W. West III thinks the author’s work still resonates.

Greg Brandeau M.B.A. ’92 returned to Duke to talk about his book, Collective GeniusThis past spring Greg Brandeau M.B.A. ’92, former chief technology officer at The Walt Disney Studios and the coauthor of a new book from Harvard Business Review Press called Collective Genius, returned to campus to talk to students at the Fuqua School of Business about leadership that has the power to transform companies. He calls it the “collective genius.”

America’s history is written into its music. These sheets of feel-good summertime music for voice and piano are artifacts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They’re part of the American Sheet Music Project, a historic collection of more than 3,000 pieces stored in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library.The assortment includes waltzes, operas, musicals, polkas, spirituals, war tunes, and songs of the Tin Pan Alley variety.

Each spring, seniors are given the opportunity to climb to the top of the chapel tower and take in the stunning views. Within the tower are the carillon bells that ring each day at 5 p.m., as well as during university ceremonies. The chapel is perhaps Duke’s best-known building. But what is not well known is that a rarely visited room lies beneath the carillon level, about halfway up the tower.

Toomey is the cartoonist behind Sherman’s Lagoon, a comic strip that follows the lives of ocean characters addressing environmental topics such as shark finning, ocean pollution, and threats to the world’s coral reefs. The strip is syndicated in 250 newspapers, thirty foreign countries, and five languages. He has won two Environmental Hero Awards from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “for using art and humor to conserve and protect our marine heritage.”When did your passion for marine conservation begin?

In the past five years, MOOCs—massive open online courses—have lived up to at least one part of their name. With hundreds of thousands of people enrolling in the most popular listings on sites like Coursera, MOOCs are indeed massive. But, as exciting as it may be to trade notes on Dan Ariely’s (Ph.D. ’98) theory of irrational behavior with a banker in Kazakhstan, sometimes you want something a bit more intimate.

There’s no single blueprint to creating a song; each composer has his own approach. From finding a new way to adapt a classic to working within time constraints, there are many things at play when it comes to writing music. A trio of Duke alumni knows these rigors all too well. In a given week, Michael Ching ’80 and George Lam Ph.D. ’11 may be working out the kinks of a new opera, while Bill Cunliffe ’78 is writing the latest song for his big band. Though they share a goal in creating music, each takes his own path getting there.GEORGE LAM

From the time he performed in an abridged version of Cinderella when he was eight years old, Andrew Jacobs has been a theater kid. He acted in plays all through elementary, middle, and high schools, and joined Hoof ‘n’ Horn once he got to Duke. When he started to wonder about the management side of theater, his adviser steered him toward Duke in Chicago.

You had to break barriers as one of the first female fighter pilots in the U.S. Navy. Is it easier to work in an academic setting? Engineering is still a primarily male environment. My research can be a little controversial— human interaction with technology. Some engineers aren’t crazy about it. They think the work belongs more in psychology than in engineering. So you’re interested in human psychology as well as machines?

Most universities are located where they were founded: Harvard is in Cambridge, Stanford is in Palo Alto, UNC is in Chapel Hill. But one of Duke’s peculiarities is that it chose to be in Durham. Trinity College was founded in rural Randolph County—and in 1892, the college packed up its bell and its library, loaded them onto a boxcar, and moved to Durham.

THE CATALYST: Melody Jue believes that deep water can make a fascinating setting for science fiction and other literature. A literature Ph.D. student and scuba diver, Jue traveled to Mexico to study underwater museums for her dissertation, “Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater.” Her study of the field of “ocean humanities” will continue with this course, which she brings to the Duke Marine Lab for the first time this summer.