 Having somebody like me in the center, I think, is exactly what the center is about. It doesn't do the norm or the expected, and I'm a minority in the center. There aren't a lot of literature people, but the work that I was doing is clearly about law and literature, particularly in religion, particularly because I'm working with 18th and 19th century African-American families, and that involves marriage, it involves family making, it involves all kinds of things, and when 90% of African-Americans prior to the war were enslaved, then the law was particularly important, and how did they survive and how did their marriages stay intact and how did their children grow and how come they didn't die out, but prospered was because of religion, and so that was what I was interested in, how it happened. I love going places where I haven't been before, like across Clifton, across the bridge to the medical side, and so that was sort of like rare rabbit, you know, when they mentioned this I thought, yes, that would be a good thing for me to try. Being in the center has really changed my work. For one thing, going across the street, coming over to law and working with people in law and in public health and the great kind of diaspora of people interested in a particular thing, but coming from very different perspectives, made me realize that my perspective was not the center of the universe, and I had to learn how to talk with them and how to make what I was finding so important, important to them, help them understand that, and I think that was the biggest change. I learned a lot from talking with theologians, from talking with lawyers, from talking Anita Bernstein is just a real hoot and Martha Feynman, and all these people that I came to like, and some people from my own college, like Mark Jordan, who I'd sing but didn't know, and having them as kind of personal colleagues means that I can call upon them and ask them to read this or check that, or Mark, tell me again about same-sex marriage in the 14th century, so I can actually do a better job, but basically it was the idea of trying to learn that each one of us comes from a different place and that we don't necessarily speak the same language even if we're speaking English. If this was the first or one of the first interdisciplinary centers at Emory, then it has changed Emory, Emory, because Emory prides itself now on being an interdisciplinary site of learning, and from, you know, students come because they can do interdisciplinary work, faculty come because they can do interdisciplinary work, and in fact many of us stay because we can do this. It's a challenge and it's exciting and it's something you don't find everywhere. I would hope that this center has had an effect beyond the university. I suspect it has, because the conferences and many of the publications, and actually just the mailings they do, I'll go to a varied group of people, and you can hardly go six months without getting something from the center, and so eventually somebody's going to pick it up and look at it, but I think from the attendance at the conferences that I've been to, from the kinds of lectures that they give and the people who come when Robert Franklin gave his talk, he's one of the fellows, that auditorium was filled primarily with people who hardly ever set foot on Emory's campus. They were from all over Atlanta and they occupied a number of different positions, and I think that's fairly typical. So you have both the intent or the organization of the center which understands the importance of publication and conversation outside, but you also have a number of individuals who in their own professional and personal lives are everywhere, and they bring people here and they take the ideas out to other people, and so it's working on two levels. If I were setting out the center's agenda, I would simply do more of some of the things that it already does. I would focus more on gender. I would focus more on race, various religions. It's hard, you cannot do them all, but you do have yourself situated in Atlanta, and this site is a very special site where God and guns and all come together in very, very interesting ways, and so I would put a little more emphasis up on the resources of Atlanta, both in terms of legends and icons and the practicalities. When I talk about taking advantage of its site and the resources around it, I'm talking about it in a very holistic and practical way. There are other avenues for advocacy. I belong to some, but this I think part of the treasure of this is that it is such a motley crew of ideas, idealism, personal religious beliefs, all of that. It would hurt very much. I think the work of the Center, if we try to come out in favor of or speak on that issue beyond the individual publications, the conferences to talk things over, that's the wonderful thing about these conferences is that they can have almost diametrically opposed individuals on the same program, and we can hear it in an area or in a situation where we have a chance to hear the very best minds on different ideas and come up with our own conclusions. The ways in which, even as we are sophisticated intellectual, you know, professional professors, we can behave like students. John Whitty has, does not play. He gets three hours, he doesn't want a break, but this long, and we will do all kinds of things to enlarge that break. You know, we, we just try to get him talking about something so that we can rest for a minute because it's scheduled so much, we would go from like I think two to five, and we would be exhausted. It would be very good, but I would get tickled sometimes at our stalling techniques or how in the hallway we all suddenly have to go to the restroom just at the end of the break, and he would be pulling us in. That was, it was really kind of fun. On one hand you can say it put me in my place, and on the other hand it gave me a larger place. Where I come from, women, literature, language, cultural, outside of the law, the law and religion are almost not talked about. Those are everyday things. Those are the most important things in the world. Coming over here reminded me that what I do is incredibly important in part because these folks don't know about it yet, and when I do or say something that they find really helpful, I am so excited.