The University of Wisconsin-Madison was one of the first universities to establish a program in communication, and its Communication Arts Department has taken a leading role in the development of the discipline throughout its history.
The department offers a variety of courses focusing on the principal media and modes of human communication.
Michele Hilmes, professor and chair of the Department of Communication Arts, has received a Fulbright Award to enable her to conduct research into “transnational” British and American broadcasting at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom for six months in 2013-14. Created by treaty in 1948, the U.S.-U.K. Fulbright Commission is the only bilateral, transatlantic scholarship program, offering [...]
Watching and discussing television — its production, social impact and sense of place — has given Myles McNutt a unique perspective on the American experience. Through social media, McNutt, now a University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Arts, has found the perfect intersection between research and real life. During the past [...]
A Facebook profile is an ideal version of self, full of photos and posts curated for the eyes of family, friends and acquaintances. A new study shows that this version of self can provide beneficial psychological effects and influence behavior. Catalina Toma, a UW-Madison assistant professor of communication arts, used the Implicit Association Test to measure Facebook [...]
Seven projects in the College of Letters & Science have received funding to advance the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s commitment to Education Innovation. Educational Innovation is a campus-wide initiative to create innovative approaches to education and research and set the university on the path to greater self-sufficiency. All of the EI projects were chosen based on [...]
Two graduates of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Letters & Science will receive honorary degrees at commencement next month. Errol Morris (BA’69, History), who won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Film in 2003 for “The Fog of War,” is regarded as one of the most innovative and influential filmmakers of his generation. Richard [...]
Growing up in Australia, Marie-Louise Mares didn’t have a television. Even then, she still got the occasional glimpse of “Sesame Street.” Now an associate professor of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mares and her colleague Zhongdang Pan, professor of communication arts, recently performed a meta-analysis of 24 studies of the impact of “Sesame Street” around [...]
According to a soon-to-be published meta-analysis conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, watching international co-productions of “Sesame Street” has a positive effect on children’s learning and is an “enduring example of a scalable and effective early childhood educational intervention.” Commissioned by Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization that revolutionized children’s television programming with the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Ben Relles (BA’97, Journalism) is taking his University of Wisconsin-Madison education viral. The founder of one of YouTube’s most viewed channels, “Barely Political,” Relles is transforming the world of online video and digital media. As head of programming strategy at YouTube, Relles instills his Wisconsin values as a leader and innovator, all while helping others bring [...]
Nineteen early-career faculty have been named fellows of the new Madison Teaching and Learning Excellence (MTLE) program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with 12 coming from the College of Letters & Science. The fellows competed with colleagues to participate in the yearlong program designed to improve undergraduate education by providing professional development in teaching and learning to [...]
Lousy day at work or a bad grade on an exam? New research suggests people feeling deflated seek solace in their Facebook profiles to puff themselves up. “The appeal of Facebook is greater and greater every year, which leads us to believe there might be some universal psychological needs that are being fulfilled by the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The rise of social media in China will be the focus of an upcoming panel to be held in conjunction with the Sixth Annual China Town Hall Oct. 29. Wisconsin China Initiative Director and Professor of Chinese literature and culture Nicole Huang will serve as the moderator for “Information Revolution: Social Media in China,” from [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
James Lillie (BA’83, Communication Arts) and his wife, Lisa Sheffield-Lillie, have established a Great People Scholarship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Speaking on behalf of his family’s foundation, Lillie said, “My wife, Lisa, and I have been very fortunate over our 18 years together. Very early on in our relationship we always felt that it [...]
The College of Letters & Science has more than 800 faculty, a group that includes brilliant researchers, noteworthy authors, and inspiring teachers. This year, the College welcomes more than 50 new faculty members. From Classics to Chemistry and from English to Economics, departments across L&S recruited emerging experts who bring impressive breadth and depth of [...]
Assistant Professor Lori Kido Lopez joins the Department of Communication Arts as a freshly-minted PhD from University of Southern California. She’s a runner, a gastronome, and a media expert. Thanks to the generosity of alumnus George Hamel (BA ’80, Communication Arts) and family, Communication Arts — one of the largest departments in the College of [...]
College of Letters & Science graduate Hilary (Edmondson) Stellingwerff (BA’04, Journalism and Communication Arts) will race at least one more time at the London Olympics. Stellingwerff finished sixth in her qualifying heat of the 1,500 meters Monday, giving her the final automatic qualifying spot for Wednesday’s semifinals. The Canadian finished in 4 minutes, 5.79 seconds, [...]
The College of Letters & Science will be represented at the London Olympics, starting this weekend. Mohammed Ahmed, a junior majoring in political science, will compete for Canada in the men’s 10,000 meters on Saturday. The race, which also features former Badgers distance star Matt Tegenkamp, is at 3:15 p.m. Central time and will be [...]
The Dictionary of American Regional English, a project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will hold a mini-conference to celebrate the publication of its fifth volume. Guest speakers will include Simon Winchester, author of “The Professor and the Madman,” “The Meaning of Everything,” “Krakatoa” and “The Man Who Loved China,” among many other books; Michael Adams, [...]
Jim Healy from Communication Arts and Christina Martin-Wright from the Wisconsin Film Festival promote this year’s event on “The Morning Blend.” To learn more about the 2012 film festival, click here.
As founder of the Guatemala-based Range of Motion Project (ROMP), Eric Neufeld ’98 has worked to provide more than 1,500 custom-made prosthetic limbs to people in developing countries since 2005—people who, without Neufeld’s help, might have never regained mobility. With B.A. in Biological Aspects of Conservation, Neufeld represents one of the 13 outstanding alumni of [...]
Online daters intent on fudging their personal information have a big advantage: most people are terrible at identifying a liar. But new research is turning the tables on deceivers using their own words. “Generally, people don’t want to admit they’ve lied,” says Catalina Toma, communication science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But we don’t have [...]
Spoiler alert. If you haven’t seen the film “Inglorious Basterds,” you may not want to keep reading.
Love, Lies and What They Learned (The New York Times) Featuring research from Assistant Professor of Communication Arts, Catalina L. Toma, who found that online daters tend to tell small lies when creating a profile.
Congratulations to the 10 UW-Madison Letters & Science alumni for their recognition at the 63rd Primetime Emmys! In total, Letters & Science alums were nominated for12 Emmys.
Thirteen talented, up-and-coming faculty from across campus were honored with Romnes Faculty Fellowships. Of the thirteen, seven were members of the College of Letters & Science,
“Roger Ebert: Film Criticism Is Dying? Not online” (Wall Street Journal) Featuring a nod to Communication Arts Professor Emeritus and Film Critic David Bordwell.
An extraordinary public-private partnership will allow the University of Wisconsin-Madison to enhance education and research in the humanities. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the university a $10 million grant as part of an effort to preserve and enhance the humanities at public research universities that have records of scholarly and educational excellence.
The innovative documentary filmmaker and alumnus Errol Morris (BA’69, History) visited UW-Madison October 21-22 as the capstone event of the month-long retrospective “Elusive Truths: The Cinema of Errol Morris.”
A Year of the Arts Marquee Event, “Elusive Truths: The Cinema of Errol Morris” celebrates the work and ideas of this great American documentary filmmaker — and alumnus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s History Department — with a complete retrospective of his documentary films and a sampling of his TV productions, culminating in two lectures by Mr. Morris himself …
If you watched the Emmys last weekend, you probably noticed “Modern Family” did pretty well. The show garnered six Emmy awards. And behind that hit TV show is a liberal arts alumnus from UW-Madison: Mr. Steven Levitan (BA’84, Communication Arts) …
Emeritus Communication Arts Professor David Bordwell was recently featured in the The New York Times, You Can Judge a Book by its Movie.
The Wisconsin Alumni Association (WAA) France Chapter named Kelly Jakes, PhD Candidate in UW–Madison’s Department of Communication Arts, its first Ouisconsin Scholar, on Friday, April 2.
Winter blues got you down? Check out the variety of films in this year’s International Spring 2010 program via UW Cinematheque.
What has the Department of Communication Arts been up to? A lot!
We have the iPhone, Google, Twitter, Facebook … when do we get a break?
‘Tis the season and L&S faculty and students are racking up the awards – congratulations to all!
Join Professor Lea Jacobs (Communication Arts and Film) on December 2 at 5:30p for her talk, ‘Towards a History of Taste: American Film in the 1920s’ at the Chazen Museum of Art…
The Communication Arts Department was pleased to host a special event on October 15, 2009 to honor the distinguished UW alumnus Walter Mirisch.
Professor Stephen E. Lucas, professor of communication arts and Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities, has been named a Distinguished Scholar by the National Communication Association.
Sabine Gruffat, Hamel Family Professor of Communication Arts, captured two top prizes at major film and video production competitions this fall.
The UW-Madison will host a semester-long fall lecture series based on the scholarship and art of Hip Hop.
Communication Arts Professor Robert Asen has been awarded a $450,000 grant from the William T. Grant Foundation to study school-board deliberations and decision making.
