Tytus Fellow Survives Katrina

Since media coverage of hurricane Katrina has slowed to a halt, people not directly affected by the storm probably do not think as much about life on the Gulf Coast. But for Classics Department Tytus Fellow, Susann Lusnia, a return to normal is going to take a while. Though she left UC in 1998 after earning a master’s and PhD, she is happy to be back at McMicken enjoying the opportunity to work.

Lusnia should be teaching at Tulane now. After being placed on a tenure track in 2003, she was looking forward to the start of a new school year. But the last days of August changed the course of her life quite a bit.

The Saturday before the storm, she picked up a new visiting professor from Italy at the airport, and her journey for the next few months began. “My husband and I are extremely lucky,” said Lusnia. “We went ahead and evacuated the Sunday before the storm, and we took our new colleague from Italy along.” The three woke at 4 a.m. to escape Katrina’s devastation.

Their evacuation went smoothly until they arrived at a hotel in Memphis late that night and reality sank in. She recalls, “We realized we weren’t going back for a while. We had to figure out what we were going to do.” Lusnia went to her mother’s in Virginia to plan her next course of action. The visiting professor went to Baltimore to stay with friends from her graduate school days at Johns Hopkins. br>

Then the networking began: “E-mail and the internet kept everyone together. People began offering jobs, and I began to be in touch here at UC. It is good to come ‘home’ and have a library and place to work.” Still on tenure track at Tulane, she will return to Tulane when the spring semester begins Jan. 15.

But her time here as a Tytus Fellow has been well spent. The Tytus Fellow program is a working research fellowship, and she has been revising her dissertation on the early third century A.D. building program of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus. She is also writing to make it appeal to a more general audience and to “make it a better book.”

She and her husband have returned home since the disaster and have found themselves extremely fortunate. She notes, “Our home was not flooded. We are about five blocks from campus, and most of the surrounding areas had 3-4 feet of water. We had modest damage- wind damage and a few holes, but we are incredibly lucky.”

Tulane was quite a different matter. On their Sept. 28 return, there were huge portable dehumidifiers and networks of pipes draining and drying out the buildings. Lusnia was able only to get into her office and grab a few necessities. She says that the administration is doing what it can to return to normal. After finding shelter for students and faculty, the next priority has been getting students back on track.

“They are offering a second term, sort of like summer school. They’re calling it a ‘lagniappe,’ which is a New Orleans term for ‘a little something extra.’” This will give students who missed their fall term an opportunity to catch up quickly and finish their programs on time, and, as Lusnia put it, “salvage what they can from a bad situation.”

Though she has suffered from the greatest natural disaster in American history, Lusnia remains positive and gracious. “I’m not sure I can ever fully express my gratitude to the Classics Department at UC for taking me in this fall. The outpouring of generosity from all our colleagues around the country has been amazing. It gives all of us from Tulane hope that the university and New Orleans will recover,” she says.