March 2001: Vol. 80, No. 2March 2001: Vol. 80, No. 2Grants target adolescent substance abuse, HIV-AIDS
Combating teens' at-risk behaviors
Gene Brody and Velma McBride Murry have spent years studying African-American children who are successful in school and well-adjusted emotionally, despite living in poverty and high-crime areas.
Their diligence was recently rewarded with a pair of grants totaling more than $6 million that will enable the two child and family development professors to create programs to prevent adolescents from getting involved with drugs and alcohol.
Including these most recent grants, Brody and Murry have ongoing grant projects that total more than $16 million.
Brody, who also serves as director of UGA's Family Research Center, received $3.1 million from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to develop a program to decrease substance abuse among children in rural Georgia.
"In Georgia, the most common age for alcohol and other abuse to begin is under 14," says Brody. "By starting this program when the children are 11 or 12, we hope to change their thinking."
Murry, who also works with the Family Research Center, received $3.2 million from the National Institutes of Mental Health to develop a program to decrease young African Americans' risk of contracting HIV-AIDS.
"There seems to be a link between children's perceptions of themselves as African Americans and risky behavior," she says. "Those families that teach their children to be proud of themselves and of their ethnic identity are able to buffer their children from the sorts of behavior that put children at risk for HIV-AIDS."
Both research projects will last five years and each will include some 400 participants. In addition to the two principal researchers, 40 to 60 UGA doctoral, master's, and undergraduate students will work on the projects.
Religion professor looks for clues about ancient people in 3,000-year-old writings
History in tablet form
|
 Ted Lewis went to Syria and used modern photography and computer techniques to bring a fresh interpretation to these ancient Ugaritic tablets. |
When religion professor Ted Lewis gazes at row after row of the wedges and lines that comprise the ancient Ugaritic tablets before him, he sees poetry.
Since their discovery in present-day Syria in the 1920s, the 3,000-year-old tablets have provided insight into the life and literature of the ancient Ugaritics, a Canaanite people whose image in the Bible is a negative one. But is the image justified, Lewis wonders.
"Previous translations of the tablets were done by scholars, for other scholars," he says. "The result was a literal translation that was stilted and wooden."
In translating Ugaritic, one of Lewis' many mastered languages, he is breathing new life into the text of a dead people, incorporating the alliteration, rhythm, and parallel lines of the text into a poetic English translation. The result is a beautiful integration of sound and image, as the essence of the Ugaritics comes to life.
"All that we know of the Canaanites comes from the Bible, which portrays them in a negative light," he says. "The tablets let us hear their side of the story."
Lewis makes sure that the story he is hearing is an accurate one. Because of the age and eroded condition of the original tablets, many of the markings seem ambiguous at first glance. Using modern photography and computer techniques, each mark on the tablet can be clearly seen and, thus, thoroughly understood and interpreted. Many of the translations are riddled with inaccuracies because earlier translators did not have access to this technology.
The difference in one letter can change a translation in its entirety. One of the most famous Ugaritic tablets is a story about the cannibal nature of the goddess Anat. Lewis and colleagues corrected one letter in the first line to discover that with their correction, Anat no longer appeared in the writing at all. Aside from exonerating ancient goddesses from cannibalistic accusations, Lewis is working with the Western Semitic Research Project, a group committed to photographing and digitizing the Ugaritic tablets and putting them on the World Wide Web along with the translations.
In wearing the hats of poet and scholar, Lewis hopes others will discover what he already knows: the beauty of ancient civilizations has a place in our modern world.
