News from the arts, creative programs and humanities in the College of Letters & Science.
From History to English and the performing arts to the languages, the humanities are a key component in the liberal arts tradition.
Manon van de Water, a professor of theatre research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has won the American Alliance for Theatre and Education’s 2013 Distinguished Book of the Year award for “Theatre, Youth, and Culture: A Critical and Historical Exploration” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Van de Water has been a faculty member at UW-Madison since 1998. [...]
Emily Auerbach, professor of English and the director of the Odyssey Project, recently received the Leadership in Social Justice Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Student Personnel Association at the group’s annual awards ceremony. The Odyssey Project offers a free six-credit humanities class each year to 30 students who have faced overwhelming obstacles to higher [...]
Professors, instructors and advisers enlighten, challenge and inspire us. They can shape our opinions, push our work to new heights and spark an interest to learn more about a topic or discipline. In the 2011-12 academic year, the College of Letters & Science asked graduating seniors to nominate faculty or staff members who impacted their [...]
Last month, the financial picture looked bleak for the Dictionary of American Regional English. But the picture has improved with a $100,000 gift from an anonymous donor, announced last week following the dictionary’s Board of Visitors meeting in Chicago, and a $30,000 gift from the American Dialect Society — the group that in 1962 asked the [...]
After 36 years as professor of violin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Tyrone Greive is retiring this spring. But the indefatigable musician, well-known to Madison audiences as the former concertmaster of the Madison Symphony Orchestra, will still teach, perform and indulge his lifelong passion for Polish string literature. Greive, a native of Sioux City, Iowa, came to UW-Madison [...]
“Visualizing English Print” uses Mellon Foundation funding to advance our understanding of literature and data visualization There are hundreds of millions of books in the world, a collection so stupendously large that even the most well-read among us can’t hope to make a dent. This means our ability to make connections and spot trends across [...]
“The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is one of English professor David Zimmerman’s favorite novels. In advance of the May 10 release of Baz Luhrmann’s new film, Zimmerman shares insights about the book and its characters, as well as the song (see below) he plays to his students about the beautiful illusions of the [...]
In its 120 years of existence, the UW-Madison Choral Union has established a reputation for performing major choral compositions by well-known masters. But the Choral Union has also presented contemporary compositions and will do so Saturday, April 27 and Sunday, April 28 when it performs Robert Kyr’s “Passion According to Four Evangelists.” Born in 1952, Kyr is [...]
What do you do with a doctorate in medieval history if there are no teaching positions or you want to reach a wider audience? With a $1.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities will develop career opportunities beyond academia for humanities doctoral students. The grant also will support faculty and [...]
The Dictionary of American Regional English has reached the end of the alphabet, but ‘Z’ is not the end of the road for the definitive source on American speech. Chief Editor Joan Hall says the dictionary known as DARE still has more to accomplish. The dynamic nature of language means that updating the dictionary is an ongoing [...]
Bridget Zinn (BA’99, Theatre and Drama, MA’05, Library and Information Studies) always wanted to be a published novelist. Her dream is finally coming true — nearly two years after the University of Wisconsin-Madison alum died of colon cancer. “This is something really good coming out of something really bad,” says her husband and fellow UW-Madison grad [...]
Caroline Levine is a scholar of Victorian literature — one who’s spent plenty of hours poring over the words of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters. Yet one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison English professor’s newest publications is an essay on the popular television series Mad Men, an edgy drama centered on a Madison [...]
David Bordwell first met Roger Ebert, who died yesterday after a long battle with cancer, in 2000. Ebert invited him and his wife, film theorist Kristin Thompson, to dinner after Bordwell gave a speech in Chicago. “I had no idea he knew me,” Bordwell, an emeritus professor of film studies at UW-Madison, said in [...]
The screenings of two classic features directed by King Hu, a landmark figure in world cinema, mark the latest donations to the unique collection of celebrated Taiwanese films at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Following a donation ceremony, “Dragon Gate Inn” (1967) will be screened at 11:45 a.m. Saturday, April 13, and “A Touch of Zen” [...]
The Institute for Research in the Humanities has announced its 2013-17 Senior Fellows. They are: Leslie Bow (English and Asian American Studies), Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Senior Fellow Tomislav Longinović (Slavic Languages and Literature), Senior Fellow Steven Nadler (Philosophy), Senior Fellow Ron Radano (Music), Senior Fellow Louise Young (History), Senior Fellow The Institute offers up [...]
Who owns music? Musicians who compose, perform and record something? Music companies that sell recordings? Consumers who buy copies of the recordings? These are questions that swirl around contentious issues like end-user license agreements and anti-piracy laws, as well as the growing divide between musicians who create work in home sound studios and the mega-stars who work [...]
A group of graduate students from the College of Letters & Science’s Department of Comparative Literature and Folklore traveled north to the Lac du Flambeau Reservation last month to volunteer at the second annual Ojibweg Bibooni Ataadiwin (Ojibwe Winter Games). The Winter Games — held Feb. 18-23 — are a revitalization effort of traditional Ojibwe [...]
Several graduate programs from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Letters & Science are ranked among the nation’s best in the 2014 edition of U.S. News and World Report’s “Best Graduate Schools.” “We’re proud of all of our graduate programs and particularly pleased that once again many have been rated so highly,” says Provost Paul [...]
Seven faculty members from the College of Letters & Science have been chosen to receive this year’s Distinguished Teaching Awards. Interim Chancellor David Ward will present the awards at a ceremony on March 19 at the Pyle Center. A reception hosted by the Wisconsin Alumni Association will follow; to attend, register here. The awards, chosen by a committee, honor [...]
The family of Gerda Lerner, Robinson-Edwards Professor Emerita of U.S. Women’s History, will join with the Department of History to host a celebration of Lerner’s life and work on Sunday, April 28. Lerner died on Jan. 2 at her home in Madison. She was 92. The event will take place at 1 p.m. in the [...]
Eighty high school students from 20 schools around the state had the chance to speak (and sing) in 10 different languages at the inaugural Wisconsin Global Youth Summit on Feb. 23 at Union South. The day focused on what high school students can do to bring international elements into their schools. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Language [...]
University of Wisconsin-Madison students: Want to win $2,000 this spring? If you have an idea for a new arts event, exhibition, series or project, you just might. The UW–Madison New Arts Venture Challenge is a campus-wide competition to encourage new thinking and innovative ideas. Entrants will develop and present a thorough proposal for their creations. [...]
Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy will visit the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus March 20-21 to speak to Wisconsin high school students. Roy will offer the keynote presentation for the Great World Texts Student Conference, sponsored by the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities, and will spend the day interacting with students who have read her Booker [...]
The Language Institute is hosting a series of brown bag conversations this semester on innovation in language teaching and learning. Upcoming Language Over Lunch sessions are devoted to assessing student learning outcomes in languages (April 8), maximizing language and culture learning outside of the classroom (April 15), and language learning and study abroad (April 29). [...]
It’s no surprise that UW-Madison students want to make the world a better place — and ideally make a career out of doing good, too. That can be a tall task, though. But many talented alumni have trod this path before, and that’s the focus of an upcoming career panel on “Languages and Social Justice.” “Doing [...]
A public humanities project that began as an effort to help Latino youth express themselves through art has produced a gigantic mural, a moving documentary, and a new Madison youth collective, thanks to a partnership between University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate students and community partner Centro Hispano. During the fall semester, three Ph.D. candidates in UW-Madison’s curriculum [...]
Five outstanding faculty members in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Letters & Science have been named winners of this year’s Kellett Mid-Career Awards. The Kellett award, supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, recognizes outstanding mid-career faculty members who are five to 20 years past the first promotion to a tenured position. Each winner, chosen [...]
The Institute for Research in the Humanities has announced its Resident Fellows and Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellows for 2013-14. The Resident Fellows are: Nan Enstad (History), fall semester; Jordan Zweck (English), fall semester; Karen Britland (English), spring semester; Lauren Kroiz (Art History), spring semester; Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (History), spring semester; and Ellen Sapega (Spanish and [...]
The Academic Staff Art Gallery in Bascom Hall this semester features works that combine art and science, encompassing the scientific impact of models of invertebrates, glassblowing and photography. Featured artists include Laura Halverson Monahan, curator of collections at the University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum; Tracy Drier, scientific glassblower in the Chemistry Department; and Ilia Guzei, [...]
Faisal Abdu’Allah, an internationally acclaimed British artist whose iconographic images of power, race, masculinity, violence, and faith challenge the values and ideologies society attaches to those images, is the The Arts Institute and the Department of Art History’s Spring 2013 Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence. Trained as a printmaker at the Royal College of Art and [...]
Weijia Li was born and raised in China, yet received his Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Ohio State University in 2009. So how did Li wind up studying German? Meet the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s newest assistant professor of German. Welcome, Weijia! How and why did you get into German in the first place? [...]
In forging connections with China, UW-Madison has created an international model for the university. The Innovation Office in Shanghai has opened up new opportunities for students, faculty and leaders in business and government. From the Shanghai Seminar Series to a UW account on Sino Weibo, and from technology transfer to official state visits, Wisconsin and China are closer than [...]
Tandem Press will host “Printmaking: Steeped in the Past, Shaping the Future,” a free printmaking symposium at the Chazen Museum of Art, on Thursday, Jan. 31 and Friday, Feb. 1. The symposium has been organized in conjunction with the exhibition “Tandem Press: 25 Years of Printmaking,” which closes on Sunday, Feb. 3. Distinguished national leaders in [...]
You may not have heard of Mentoring Positives, a Madison nonprofit that serves delinquent and at-risk youth throughout Dane County. Kristin Schmidt (BA’11, Communication Arts) and Samantha Winkler (BA’11, Communication Arts and Spanish) are out to change that. The two Communication Arts alums are leading a pro-bono marketing and communications campaign for Mentoring Positives as [...]
Gerda Lerner, Robinson Edwards Professor Emerita of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, died on Wednesday, Jan. 2 in an assisted-living facility in Madison. She was 92 years old. “Gerda Lerner was fierce, brilliant and unique,” said social and political activist Gloria Steinem. “She lived history by her bravery, restored history by her scholarship and [...]
Gerda Lerner, pioneer of women’s history, dies at 92 (Wisconsin State Journal) The professor emerita of history created a Ph.D. program in women’s history at UW-Madison after founding the first graduate program on the discipline in the country at Sarah Lawrence College. Read more…
When Amanda Gennerman (BA’00, Women’s Studies and Afro-American Studies) entered law school, she made a promise to herself. I will not take a corporate job. I will not do what I don’t want to do. If I’m going to practice law, it’s going to be the way that I want to do it. Twelve years [...]
There are more than 200 ways to say someone is stalling, but the Dictionary of American Regional English is not dilly-dallying when it comes to showcasing the full depth of linguistic creativity around the country. The dictionary known as DARE, a landmark project housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, now has a companion volume that [...]
Monumental discoveries were made. Critical projects were finished. Laudable programs were celebrated. And scholars and alumni were remembered in the College of Letters & Science’s 124th year.
These were just some of the markers of 2012 in L&S. Here are some of the moments that made 2012 a memorable year for the College.
After retiring in 1994 as associate dean in the College of Letters & Science, Blair Mathews has maintained his connection with the university through a variety of channels. Now, as a poet, Mathews brings a different kind of work back to campus. Two current exhibits showcase Mathews’ collaborations with local artists. “Remembering” links Mathews with [...]
Students in Ashley Hinck’s Introduction to Digital Communications course came in with a tendency to take the digital world for granted. YouTube is for silly videos. Google provides easy answers. Facebook is for friends. But it wasn’t long before they were making some eye-opening discoveries. Hinck distinctly remembers a class discussion about the Google “filter [...]
A new “gateway” course in religious studies (RELS101, Religions in Global Perspective) will move beyond the traditional survey approach and give instructors leeway to choose a more timely and effective focus. The first edition, on religion and the environment, will be taught by Anna M. Gade, associate professor of religious studies and languages and cultures of [...]
Growing up on Long Island, Steven Nadler played basketball, baseball, and street hockey, listened to Led Zeppelin, and rode his bicycle—a Schwinn Sting-Ray, and later, a 10-speed Peugeot—from one end of the island to the other. Nobody, including Nadler, would have guessed he’d become a distinguished scholar of philosophy and Jewish studies with a long [...]
Undergraduates in Louise Young’s lecture course on the Pacific war have no trouble remembering what happened in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. That’s because the Japanese attack looms large in our national psyche, says History professor Young, not only as the end of U.S. isolationism but as a metaphor for unreadiness. “Caught napping. Caught [...]
On its 10th anniversary, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Odyssey Project has much to celebrate. Journeys from homelessness to graduate school, or incarceration to meaningful employment, are two of more than 250 success stories. For some students, the best outcome is the empowerment of finding their own voice. The Odyssey Project is the subject of a new episode [...]
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) and the Wisconsin Union Directorate Film Committee are sponsoring a showing of “What Can Dead Prisoners Do?” at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 11 at The Marquee in Union South. What happened to Russian prisoners of war in Polish camps after the war [...]
What role does social media play in politics in our increasingly high-tech society? University of Wisconsin-Madison professors Lewis Friedland and Michael Xenos discussed exactly that in a Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters talk in the lead up to the 2012 fall elections. To watch the full lecture, click the above video. Friedland is [...]
A scholar of “medieval media studies” and a historian of modern Europe have each won a 2012-13 First Book Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for the Humanities. The annual award, funded by a short-term humanities grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, convenes an academic “dream team” of reviewers to help junior humanities faculty whip their first [...]
David Bethea envisioned three fundamental goals for the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature’s Pushkin Summer Institute, a pre-college enrichment program: building command of the Russian language; honing critical-thinking skills; and cultivating writing ability. But there was one outcome Bethea could not have imagined: students’ deeply emotional response to the experience. Bethea, the Vilas Research [...]
Emily Auerbach, Professor of English and the director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Odyssey Project, is one of nine semi-finalists in the Local Lady Godiva program. The Odyssey Project offers a free six-credit humanities class each year to 30 students who have faced overwhelming obstacles to higher education such as homelessness or addiction. Participants receive [...]
For Maria Belodubrovskaya, “politically incorrect” means something a little different than Bill Maher speaking his mind. Belodubrovskaya, who hails from Russia, studies giant miscalculations in communication strategy at the highest level of Soviet government. Her current project, “Politically Incorrect: Filmmaking under Stalin and the Failure of Power,” examines the Soviet Union’s failed attempt to use [...]
She writes candidly about being a single woman at age 39. He argues that “the second-class citizen” status of singles is unfair. Together, Kate Bolick and Michael Cobb are leading voices in redefining the social landscape. They are also old friends. On Thursday, Nov. 29, the two will appear as featured speakers in a Humanities Without Boundaries talk titled [...]
The song came to Laura Schwendinger like an October ghost, wending its way through time and memory. At the time, she was spending part of her sabbatical at the McDowell Colony in rural New Hampshire. “It was a strange period, very quiet,” recalls Schwendinger, a professor of composition in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of [...]
President Abraham Lincoln is more monument than man to many Americans, with his image printed on our our currency and seated atop Bascom Hill, among other places. On Friday, director Steven Spielberg’s movie “Lincoln,” with Irish actor Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role, opens in theaters. UW-Madison experts discussed the depiction of presidents in the [...]
“Wreck-It Ralph,” Disney’s 3D animated film about a video game character who smashes everything in his path, made history on Sunday after earning $49.1 million in ticket sales, the highest-grossing opening weekend in Disney animation history. The mega-success of the flick was predicted early on by the film’s assistant picture editor and University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate Rick [...]
Last week’s announcement that Disney had purchased Lucasfilm and planned to launch a new set of Star Wars movies sent shock waves through the science fiction world and beyond. Social media platforms exploded as fans expressed their disbelief, outrage and curiosity. It was a great disturbance in the Force, you might say. Derek Johnson, an assistant professor [...]
As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Florencia Mallon wanted to write fiction. But fact came first. “For fiction, you really have to have a voice of your own,” Mallon says. “Back then, I wasn’t ready to express it.” So she studied Latin American history, a subject she has written numerous books about and has taught at the University of [...]
Sonja Klocke specializes in 20th- to 21st-century German culture with a specific focus on postwar and contemporary German literature and film, including the legacy of the GDR (socialist East Germany) and the Holocaust, women’s writing, minority literature, and transnational literature. Currently, she is working on a book project, “Inscriptions and Rebellions: The Female Body in [...]
What inspired Sheldon (BBA’51, LLB’53) and Marianne Lubar to create the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005? What are the goals of the Institute? What impact does it make on the lives of students? Hear from students, faculty and University administrators in this new video [...]
As globalization brings together people and markets, we often hear about the importance of intercultural understanding and communication. But what does it mean for University of Wisconsin-Madison students to gain a global education? And how will it help them in their future careers? That is the focus of an upcoming alumni panel “Languages and Business“. [...]
With a sweep of his pen, Abraham Lincoln changed the lives of 4 million black Americans when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation that led to the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery in the U.S. But a striking, often-overlooked campus mural by John Steuart Curry tells a part of the story that’s often forgotten. “The Freeing of the Slaves” adorns [...]
Jeremy Morris joins the University of Wisconsin-Madison from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has written about the aftershocks of the transition from music on compact discs to music on digital files and online, as well as the politics of podcasting, the technologies of music production and consumption (GarageBand, looping pedals, mp3 Players, and more), [...]
Neuroscience is hot — not only for scientists, but also for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Jenell Johnson looks into emerging “neurodisciplines” such as neurohistory, neuroethics, and neuroeconomics, to determine where this trend is headed, what it might produce, and whether it represents a new frontier in transdisciplinary inquiry. Oh, and she also [...]
As he received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the Wisconsin Alumni Association in Madison last week, Carl Djerassi took time to talk about his many passions. Born in Vienna in 1923, Djerassi emigrated to the United States in 1939, and received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1945. In 1951, he and two [...]
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Language Institute will host its annual World Languages Day on Wednesday, Nov. 7 at Union South. World Languages Day is a college-for-a-day experience that introduces high school students from around the state of Wisconsin to the bevy of languages and cultural topics offered at UW-Madison. Faculty, staff and students offer a [...]
James Sweet, Vilas-Jartz Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his book Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press). The Douglass Prize was jointly created by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center [...]
The cover of Rob Nixon‘s new book features black smoke, drifting across a dreary cityscape. The title, “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” hints at grim topics within: radiation contamination, toxic drift, the destruction of ecosystems and communities to make way for dams or mines. But the book, which has just won the 2012 American [...]
Sara McKinnon ponders home and hospitality, but not in the Martha Stewart vein. A scholar of transnational feminist theory and intercultural rhetoric, McKinnon examines what happens when women fleeing persecution in their own countries seek asylum in the west. Are they welcomed on humanitarian grounds? Does their plight serve to enrich another, larger agenda? McKinnon [...]
Shuxing Fan’s background is as remarkable as his artwork. Fan, who joined the Department of Theatre and Drama as an assistant professor this fall, lived through the Cultural Revolution in his native China. He was part of the famed “Class of ’77” – a group of young Chinese scholars that belatedly entered universities after the [...]
Assistant Professor James Messina comes to the Department of Philosophy after a year on the faculty at Southern Utah University. The Horseheads, New York, native is an expert in all things Kant. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego (where he says he spent most of his time snorkeling and lying [...]
Eric Hoyt, a new Assistant Professor of Media & Cultural Studies with the Department of Communication Arts, bridges past and present with cutting-edge work in digitization that makes life easier for media historians. While pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Hoyt created Lantern, a search tool for media historians [...]
University of Wisconsin-Madison Journalism and Mass Communication Professor Young Mie Kim sprung up as an innovator in action even before the Year of Innovation dawned this week on campus. Together with colleagues at the Morgridge Center for Public Service, Kim embraced South Madison partners in her community-based learning/research course through the School of Journalism and [...]
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Odyssey Project, which provides people facing economic barriers with a chance to start college, marks its 10th anniversary tonight in a celebration at the Chazen Museum of Art from 5-7 p.m. In this introductory humanities course, students gain a voice and a sense of empowerment through lively discussions of literature, history, philosophy, [...]
Vlad Dima joins the Department of French and Italian after earning his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He’s published articles on sound issues in the films of Quentin Tarantino, Djibril Mambety and Jean-Luc Godard, studied the female voice in the sitcom Seinfeld, delved into the evolution of the murder scene in Hitchcock’s movies and [...]
Eli Clare, acclaimed activist and author of the award-winning “Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation,” will visit UW-Madison as a Brittingham Visiting Scholar for the week of Oct. 8-12. Clare speaks, teaches, and facilitates all over the United States and Canada at conferences, community events, and colleges about disability, queer and trans identities, and [...]
