Happy New Year, friends! 2017 feels like a year full of promise for me and I hope that you feel the same way! It is my extreme honor and pleasure to bring you another feature on the “SoulShine Series!” I’m so excited about the direction this portion of the blog is headed and I can not wait to spotlight some wonderful nurses and professionals using this platform.
In today’s series, I am so honored to feature an incredibly unique woman and teacher of future nurses. Dr. Kay Saucier Lundy is a Professor Emeritus of Nursing at The University of Southern Mississippi. She loves to use all sorts of media in her instruction and her teaching methods are as fun and colorful as her personality! One thing I remember from my time under Dr. Lundy’s instruction, is her love for teaching. She was and is always smiling. Smiling is a natural reflex when you are doing something you love. There is no doubt in my mind that Dr. Lundy loves nursing and nursing education! If you need a little “proof” (there is no such thing as proof) of how unique Dr. Lundy is, check out this excerpt from the email she sent me: …”Lecturing is SO deadly boring. I fear we will one day learn in research that people can actually become ill or die from Power Point!” See what I mean?
Here is more about Dr. Lundy in her own words:
Karen Saucier Lundy, PhD, RN, FAAN
_Author, Consultant and Professor Emeritus____________________________________
The University of Southern Mississippi
Dr. Karen Saucier Lundy is currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern Mississippi College of Nursing, has been in higher education for over 30 years and received her graduate degrees in both nursing and sociology from the University of Colorado in Boulder. She is a member of the prestigious American Academy of Nursing which has resulted from her authorship of award-winning texts in community health nursing, teaching and research in international settings to promote community health, historical research and nursing education and her commitment to the education of nursing students at all levels. Her ground breaking textbook coauthored with Dr. Sharyn Janes, Community Health Nursing: Caring for the Public’s Health (3rd ed. 2016) was first published in 2001 and has become one of the top sellers in the United States and in countries throughout the world. Dr. Lundy has been the recipient of two American Journal of Nursing Books of the Year awards. Dr. Lundy’s most recent text is Families in Context: Sociological Perspectives (3rd Ed, 2015) with Gene H. Starbuck and published by Paradigm Publishers in Boulder, Colorado. Dr. Lundy has an extensive background in curricula and program evaluation through her nearly three decades as a nursing educator, clinical specialist in neonatal and public health nursing and consultant. She has served as a National League of Nursing accreditation evaluator and team leader and was selected as a program evaluator in the inaugural group for the Association of American Colleges Nursing accreditation division and team leader/evaluator (CCNE). She has also served on the Mississippi Board of Nursing and is active in many professional national nursing, sociological, and historical organizations. Dr. Lundy has chaired two AACN Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) self-studies and campus visits at Delta State University, where she served as Dean, and at the University of Southern Mississippi College of Nursing. She has conducted longitudinal historical research related to the German nurse role in the Third Reich euthanasia program in Hadamar, Germany, ethnographic studies of sex tourism and public health in Cuba, historical research of African-American nursing history in Mississippi, ethnohistorical research of Florence Nightingale and Joan d’Arc and mysticism in France, and the role of the nurse healer in the witch burnings in France. Dr. Lundy serves as an editorial board member and reviewer for several journals related to nursing education, qualitative and historical research, global ethics and community/public health nursing.
I am also attaching this excerpt from Dr. Lundy…mainly because I LOVE it!!…
I began college last century and had difficulty deciding on a major. Sound familiar? I eventually graduated with a BS degree in nursing from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1976; with minors in psychology, biology and sociology (I changed majors six times!). Since my original career plans in high school were to become a veterinarian and zookeeper, those career goals were abandoned after learning that women were not accepted into veterinary school nor hired in zoos. The feminist movement had affected our society in many ways but in practice, many career choices were closed to women.
After two years of working at the University of Mississippi Medical Center as a neonatal intensive care (NICU) clinical nurse and transport nurse, I became very interested in research and learning more about the bigger picture of maternal child health. I volunteered for research work while in the NICU with orangutans and placental drug transfer which finally linked my interest in animals to science. I earned my MS degree in community health nursing at the University of Colorado College of Nursing in Denver, taking courses in psychology and sociology along the way. After working with the U.S. Public Health Service for two years in Florida and Mississippi, I returned to Colorado and enrolled in the sociology PhD program at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Over the next few years, I taught sociology and nursing and continued to work in neonatal intensive care as a nurse in Denver. At one point in my life, I almost gave up nursing as a profession and pursue sociology as an academic career. That is a story for another time. Needless to say, for me– once a nurse, always a nurse. At the tender age of 30, I was offered a position as the Dean of the Delta State University School of Nursing in Mississippi and was there for five years. I continued my research in sociology and public health and met my husband, who was a native of the Mississippi delta. He is an educator as well and completed his doctorate two months before our son, Parker, was born in 1990 (yes, I was a ‘geriatric primigravida’!). Parker turned 26 this year and is in graduate school for clinical psychology and neuroscience. He remains the joy of our lives. My husband, Dr. Christopher Lundy, recently retired from his position as an academic counselor, administrator and psychometrician at a local community college. We share a home with six cats (or maybe it is the other way around?) and remain involved in volunteer work with animal rescue, so my love of animals and their well-being has brought me full circle.
During my course of study in sociology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I fell in love with philosophy, the history of science and gender role research in the media. After relocating to our home in Hattiesburg, I took a position at the University of Southern Mississippi in the College of Nursing as Associate Dean and occasionally taught sociology, as well. I teach public health, research, philosophy of science and qualitative research. I also love to write and have three texts out in public health and sociology.
My research interests are varied and always keep me busy with projects which involve international travel—German nurses and euthanasia during the Third Reich, sexual tourism and public health in Cuba; folk healers in Jamaica and medieval health in Europe. I most recently taught sociology at the USM Abbye campus in France for a semester. I lean to historical research and the sociology of role deviance. My latest research involves the transformation of healer to witch in medieval Europe and a comparative study of Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale, related to their mystical lives. While at the USM Abbey in Pontlevoy, France, I taught introductory sociology and the sociology of European ‘witches’ and healers. My teaching experience in sociology is in family, social issues, media and gender, health and medicine, deviance and general sociology. My love of philosophy, nursing, public health and history is woven throughout all of my research. I still lean to the Greek philosophers, but in recent years have immersed myself in phenomenology, the French enlightenment and German ideology. And just to keep my feet firm on the ground, I continue to write about the application of philosophy in country music, especially related to gender role. I am very much a child of the 60s and see the academic world as the only place that eccentrics like me fit.
I retired from the University of Southern Mississippi College of Nursing four years ago as Professor Emeritus and am enjoying the flexibility, after more than 25 years in full-time academics. My academic life is far from over, nor is my professional work in nursing. I continue to teach on occasion, as a guest lecturer at USM, am engaged in social media and other universities in both nursing and sociology in the virtual world of online learning. As with many who retire, I find myself very busy with those ‘back burner’ projects that have been simmering for years. I continue to conduct research, consult, write and am in the process of revising our text (4rd ed.), Community Health Nursing: Caring for the Public’s Health (previous versions Lundy and Janes; 4th ed. Julie Sanford). My husband and I travel a great deal, but through technology can remain connected. I am fascinated with technology, which has expanded my world in our international travels, both personally and professionally. We are headed back to Paris, France in 2017 for the French Open Tennis Tournament and continuing my research in Europe involving Florence Nightingale and Joan of Arc.
I am an eternal student, believe in the power of education in changing our world and have learned more from my students than any formal course of study. They enhance and enrich my world with their optimism and passion for making the world a better place. More than anything, I believe in the power of critical and reflective thinking and of nurses to heal our world. I have a very broad definition of health. My mother used to say that common sense is far from common. The older I grow, the more I learn, the less I know. What a wonderful epiphany of middle age!
I am privileged to being a part of knowledge generation and learning by staying engaged with current and former students from all corners of the globe. I am honored to be a nurse, academic, researcher, and eternal student of life. I believe, as did Socrates, that the “unexamined life is not worth living.”
Please help me in thanking Dr. Lundy for “being the light!”
