P E O P L E
Anthony G. Hirschel, the new director of the Michael C. Carlos Museum, comes to Emory from the Bayley Art Museum at the University of Virginia, where he served as director for six years.
At the Bayley Museum, Hirschel undertook an ambitious exhibition schedule highlighted by presentations of Old Masters prints, drawings by Thomas Jefferson, and Tibetan and Nepalese art. He also expanded programming, including lecture series, theatrical activities, and concerts. Simultaneously, he worked with the University of Virginia's art department to create additional graduate fellowships and to establish a gallery devoted to curriculum-driven exhibitions drawn from the Bayley's permanent collection.
Emory Provost Billy Frye acknowledged the range of Hirschel's accomplishments, calling him "a man who understands the dual nature of the museum as both an arm of the academic community and a public museum."
The Carlos Museum, says Hirschel, is "one of the finest and most active university museums in the country, a prominence it achieved in a remarkably short period of time. The museum operates at the very highest levels of the international art world and at the same time makes a significant contribution to the cultural life of Emory and Atlanta."
Prior to working at the Bayley Museum, Hirschel was affiliated with the Yale University Art Gallery and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
In a campus ceremony attended by a Nobel Laureate and a Pulitzer Prize winner, the National Black Arts Festival (NBAF) announced its selection of composer, musician, and Emory Professor of Music Dwight Andrews as artistic director of its 1998 event.
Founded in 1987 by the Fulton County Arts Council, the NBAF biennially presents the work of artists of African descent in eight disciplines: dance, film, folk art, literature, music, performance art, theater, and visual art. Some fifteen hundred artists from the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and South America participate in the Atlanta-based event, which drew more than 1.1 million visitors in 1996.
Andrews has achieved national prominence for his music scholarship in the areas of jazz history, popular culture, and music and race, and for his contributions to contemporary music as a composer and performer. For more than a decade he has provided music direction for the plays of Pulitzer Prize-winner August Wilson (who spoke at the NBAF announcement, as did Wole Soyinka, the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts and winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature). Andrews served as the first Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music at Harvard University this spring.
A pioneering voice for women and minorities at Emory, Lore Metzger died January 31, 1997. She was seventy-one. Metzger, who began teaching English and comparative literature at Emory in 1968, was the University's first female full professor. She founded the Emory University Women's Caucus in 1984. She was instrumental in developing the plan that became the University's Women's Studies Program, now a doctorate-granting discipline. She also chaired the University Senate and the University Research Committee and served as president of the Emory chapter of the American Association of University Professors. In the larger academic world, Metzger was secretary general of the International Comparative Literature Association and an officer in the Modern Language Association and the Comparative Literature Association.
Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology Robert Paul's book, Moses and Civilization: The Meaning Behind Freud's Myth, has received the National Jewish Book Award in the category of "Jewish Thought."
Director of the Emory Center for Leadership and Career Studies Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld has been appointed to the President's Circle of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.
Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies Deborah E. Lipstadt has been appointed to a newly formed Special Advisory Committee to the Secretary of State on Religious Freedom Abroad.
James Robert McCord Professor of Gynecology and Obstetrics John A. Rock is serving as president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
--compiled by Andrew W. M. Beierle
