A Little About Betty Jean
When Betty Jean goes to work
Betty Jean Craige is University Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia.
She has published books in the fields of literature, history of ideas, politics, ecology, and art. Two of her translations of Marjorie Agosín’s poetry were published by Sherman Asher: Poems for Josefina and Mother, Speak to Us of War / Madre, háblanos de la guerra.
Her books Reconnection: Dualism to Holism in Literary Study, which won the Frederic W. Ness Book Award from the Association of American Colleges, Laying the Ladder Down: The Emergence of Cultural Holism, which won the Georgia Author of the Year Award, American Patriotism in a Global Society, and Eugene Odum: Ecosystem Ecologist and Environmentalist explore the development in the twentieth century of a holistic understanding of culture and nature.
Betty Jean Craige has also published several art books on the Spanish artist Alvar Suñol. Her documentary Alvar Suñol: His Vision and His Art won first place in Short Documentary at the Indie Gathering film festival in 2006.
Cosmo expresses what's on her mind in English whether or not she means to communicate with me.
What do we learn from these achievements by our non-human companions? We learn that they have a capacity for thinking and feeling way beyond what we previously attributed to them.
We must realize that all of us—humans and animals alike—are thinking all the time about one another, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with fear, sometimes with affection. We all have an active mental life. The struggle to survive and find pleasure requires it.