Hats off to our Emeritus College volunteers!
July 10, 2009The Correspondence of Samuel Becket thanks two Heilbrun Fellows of Emory’s Emeritus College who have been steadfast volunteers with the project. Their presence has energized the team!
Although retired from the teaching of acting in Emory’s Theater Studies Department, Brenda Bynum is not at all retiring in her engagement in “all things Beckett.” For several years she has been volunteer non pareil with the Beckett Project, most recently as an assiduous proofreader of the first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett.
No wonder. She has acted in six of Beckett's plays on stage and in film, including Happy Days, Rockaby, Footfalls, and Not I. She appeared in Enough at the International Beckett Festival in The Hague in 1992. Her directing credits include productions of Beckett’s short plays at the Atlanta Beckett Festival in 1987, the Year of Beckett 2006, and at Theater Emory and other venues. Her personal quest to make Atlanta one of the few cities in the world to have mounted professional productions of Beckett's entire dramatic canon was successfully completed in 1999.
Brenda Bynum’s Heilbrun Fellowship from the Emeritus College enabled her to conduct research on the life of Mary Hutchinson, woman of the arts and a friend of Samuel Beckett. The Emory community will remember her lively presentation on Mary Hutchinson, and her recent readings from the letters of Flannery O’Connor. In March 2009, before a hushed and attentive crowd in Glenn auditorium, Brenda directed and performed in Fundamental Sounds, readings from the early letters of Samuel Beckett with Edward Albee, Salman Rushdie, and Robert Shaw-Smith, a sparkling evening that celebrated the publication of the first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett.
The Emory community knows David H. Hesla as a graduate of St. Olaf College, and of the Department of English and of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, and for his years of teaching in the College and the Graduate School. His book, The Shape of Chaos:The Art of Samuel Beckett (University of Minnesota Press, 1971) was one of the first extended examinations of Beckett’s work; it continues to be held in high regard by scholars in the field. His writings on Beckett, philosophy, and religion always touch a chord of recognition and provoke new ideas.
David was awarded a Heilbrun Fellowship by the Emeritus College in 2008 in part to prepare family diaries and papersfor deposit in appropriate archives. Between times, he is a regular and persnickety proofreader and advisor of the Beckett Project, generous with his mind as well as his time.
Why Beckett? "I read the first two sentences of Murphy, and I was hooked."
If you are looking for a volunteer activity, please contact Lois Overbeck 404-727-6840 or lois.overbeck@emory.edu.