Written by Jessica Lee Stovall, an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the director of The SoulFolk Collective.
A roadside sign that welcomes drivers to Burlington notes that the Wisconsin city was the boyhood home of Tony Romo, a former Dallas Cowboys quarterback and current television commentator.
There is no mention of Frederic Edward Mohs, born there in 1910, the visionary physician who invented a skin-cancer procedure bearing his name that has benefited millions.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Dance Department is celebrating its 100th year of operation, making it the oldest in the United States to offer an accredited dance degree. While the program was established in June 1926, founder Margaret H’Doubler began her instruction nine years prior.
UW-Madison’s dance department celebrates its one-hundredth anniversary this year. A century of history comes with challenges faced along the way. Much of the department’s success is accredited to innovative contributions by founder Margaret H’Doubler and student dancers.
A statue of Vel Phillips stands at the corner of Main and Carroll streets in Madison — the only statue of a Black woman on the grounds of the Wisconsin State Capitol.
Phillips, who became the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s law school in 1951, built a career defined by historic firsts in Wisconsin politics and civil rights.
Before she was commissioned by the Obamas, she made her mark in Milwaukee contributing work to Shepard Fairey’s “Voting Rights are Human Rights” mural on the north side of the Colby Abbot building, 759 N. Milwaukee St.
In 2010, she received her master’s in fine arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Two years later, she became the first Black woman to win the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for individual artists. In 2015, she won the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Love of Humanity award.
“The World According to Allee Willis” will be screened as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival on April 10 at the Chazen Museum of Art. Fenton, an award-winning creative visualist and writer (she’s won three Emmys and a Grammy) and Willis’ longtime partner, will lead a discussion after the screening.
Willis grew up in Detroit in the 1950s during the height of Motown and was heavily inspired by the music coming out of the city. She studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before moving to Los Angeles.
Amy Zelenski, associate professor and director of Education Innovation and Scholarship at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, teaches an elective class in improvisational theater.
She recently visited WPR’s “The Larry Meiller Show” to discuss the relationship between improv and improving health care.
“I started my career working with medical residents, and I realized that they could say the words, but they were struggling with the connection piece,” Zelenski recalled.
The dry spell is a swift reversal from back-to-back blockbuster years for concerts at American Family Field in 2023 and 2024.
It’s also happening as another Wisconsin stadium has entered the concert picture.
Camp Randall Stadium, home of the University of Wisconsin Badgers football program, hosted its first concerts since 1997 last year with Wallen and Coldplay, and has an AC/DC concert scheduled July 19. On top of that, Lambeau Field is back in the live music business – hosting its first concerts since 2019 with Luke Combs May 15 and 16 – with the Green Bay Packers’ new CEO and President Ed Policy vowing to book more events.
On Feb. 21, the station took home one of the highest awards in college journalism: the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System named WSUM the best college station in the nation.
Kelsey Brannan, the director of student radio at WSUM — one of the station’s two full-time employees — said WSUM’s students provide listeners with authentic shows and music that aren’t replicated on other stations or streaming services.
“You’re hearing students bring in music that you’re not hearing anywhere else,” Brannan said. “They’re telling news stories from their perspective that you’re not getting from the national news or even local outlets — it’s a really unique perspective. You’re hearing sportscasters who are students who are calling the games that their peers are participating in. There’s something really special about that.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter, with help from the Madison Anarchist League chapter and several local bands, organized a fundraiser for Sudan at the Mousetrap on Feb. 28.
Ada Deer was an esteemed Native American leader from Wisconsin and the first woman to lead the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
She grew up in the Menominee tribe and graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in social work, later establishing the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program.
Anna Andrzejewski, an art historian who arrived at UW–Madison in the early 2000s, is the first holder of the Wright professorship, which was inaugurated on July 1, 2025.
Andrzejewski has taught a course on Wright’s architecture and writings since 2016. The endowed professorship — which she calls “utterly transformative and inspiring” — will enhance and expand Andrzejewski’s Wright-related teaching and research while supporting student field trips to Wright-designed buildings in the region.
“As I argue in a new essay for Inquisitive magazine, institutional neutrality as originally formulated by the University of Wisconsin in 1894 is a concept that protects academic freedom by prohibiting colleges from punishing or condemning faculty for their political views. The issue of affirmative institutional statements is a much later, and more minor, concern. But when a university condemns certain political stands, it inevitably creates the danger of suppressing those ideas.”
“Universities ought to return to the 1894 University of Wisconsin approach to the opinionated university, where academic freedom is so important that even denouncing a professor violates standards of neutrality. But when the concept of institutional neutrality is abused by politicians and administrators to silence faculty, then it becomes a cure worse than the disease. Soucek’s book recognizes these dangers and provides a thoughtful approach to trying to address the problems inherent in the inevitable opinions of a university.”
Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University whose research focuses on poverty, housing insecurity, public policy and urban inequality. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2015.
University of Wisconsin-Madison President Edward Birge did not want the university to be known as a dancing school.
But after physical education instructor Margaret H’Doubler began teaching dance classes in 1918, that’s the direction things were headed. Hundreds of students signed up each semester, and H’Doubler and her students were being invited to colleges and universities across the country to share their methods.
Birge took away H’Doubler’s travel privileges, to no avail.
“It was too late. Other institutions were inviting H’Doubler all the time, and if she couldn’t come to them, they would come to her,” said Andrea Harris, professor of dance history and Buff Brennan faculty fellow in dance at UW-Madison. “The interest outweighed any pushback that there was at that time.”
On Feb. 25, UW Madison assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean History Jorell Melendez-Badillo shared his research on Puerto Rico for UW’s premier history honor society, Phi Alpha Theta.
Puerto-Rican superstar Bad Bunny understands the importance of Puerto Rican history and is incorporating it into his music, which is currently the most streamed in the world. Melendez-Badillo’s study of Puerto Rico is so comprehensive that Bad Bunny himself reached out for assistance for his Grammy-winning album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” after reading his work.
Melendez-Badillo shared how he was asked to provide a historical lens for the album as a public historian. His main task was to create 17 historical narratives to accompany the songs’ YouTube visualizers, from “conquest to present.” These videos reached a massive audience, with the video for the “DtMF” alone reaching 115 million views.
The Blk Pwr Coalition and non-profit organization Leaders Igniting Transformation reflected on the Black Panther Party’s historical activism and current political challenges at an event Wednesday at the Multicultural Student Center.
The University of Wisconsin’s Blk Pwr Coalition held an event in collaboration with the Leaders Igniting Transformation club Wednesday to talk about the history of the Black Power Movement.
Award-winning writer, healing justice practitioner and yogi Yolo Akili Robinson hosted Black Love as A Practice: A WorkShop to Help us Embody The Love We Desire Wednesday night, an event planned by the Black History Month Planning Committee (BHMPC) and the Black Cultural Center (BCC) where students rethought Black love not just as a feeling, but as a practice and a behavior.
Beyond Lake Mendota, Ho-Chunk ancestors left their mark on the landscape through a massive collection of effigy mounds used for gathering, ritual and burial, with at least 4,000 remaining throughout Wisconsin. Today tourists can visit the roughly 200 mounds in Madison, and take the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s First Nations Cultural Landscape Tour – a walking tour that explores upwards of 12,000 years of human history (running between 1 March and 30 November).
“I think the tours are so important for campus,” said Omar Poler, an Indigenous education coordinator in the Office of the Provost and a member of the Sokaogon Chippewa Community. “They’ve changed the way that UW-Madison sees and understands its own place,” Poler notes, adding that this is especially true of the tour guides.
Attention is also put on the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The university is noted for its First Wave Hip Hop and Urban Arts Scholarship Program, which provides a four-year, full tuition scholarship for incoming students for artistic programs.
For most of his career, Lowe taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received his Master of Fine Arts in 1973. After more than two decades of teaching sculpture and American Indian studies, he moved to D.C. in 2000 to take a job as the first curator of contemporary Native art at the National Museum of the American Indian — the same museum now honoring his work.
Music educator and violinist Zeynep Alpan believes music is more than entertainment — it teaches “life.”
Alpan, who works on music education programming with the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center, is the co-founder of Global Impact Musician (GIM), a nonprofit based in New York and partnered with the University of Wisconsin-Madison that works with young professional musicians in East Africa.
How Bad Bunny became the global voice of a generation in crisis — and what it means when resistance becomes profitable. Includes interview with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a professor of Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latin American History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s the author of Puerto Rico: A National History. He is also the author of the history visualizers for Bad Bunny’s DTMF album.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison hosted a stop on a traveling euchre competition, bringing players together to celebrate the popular Midwest card game.
Campus winners received $1,000 in scholarship funds and will advance to regional competition for a chance to qualify for the 2026 World Euchre Championship in New Glarus, Wisconsin.
Many people think that the amount they spend on a gift is directly associated with how much the receiver will appreciate it. But as long as it meets reasonable expectations, the people you are gifting are unlikely to care too much about how you spend, said Dr. Evan Polman, professor of marketing at Wisconsin School of Business at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He also focuses on gift-giving decision-making.
The goal of gift giving should be relationship maintenance, especially on a holiday so focused on love, and gifting an activity or experience you and your loved one can do together is a great way to spend quality time together while communicating your level of care, Polman said.
The Wisconsin Historical Society has reopened and expanded its hip hop exhibit for Black History Month, offering visitors a deeper look into more than five decades of hip hop culture in Wisconsin.
Phase two of the “Lead Between the Rhymes” exhibit now includes recognition of University of Wisconsin artists, students, professors and student organizations that partnered with Madison’s hip hop scene. These collaborations helped organize events including the “Hip Hop as a Movement” conference and other significant cultural gatherings.
The scribe who copied Phaenomena, which details how various constellations rise and set, onto the parchment integrated descriptions of the stars’ positions that were probably based on Hipparchus’ work. The celestial objects’ coordinate system and accuracy align with references to the ancient astronomer’s writings, reports Science News’ Adam Mann. “There’s an appendix which includes coordinates of the stars discussed in the poem, and then little sketches of the star maps,” Minhal Gardezi, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who is working on the project, tells the outlet.
Tensions rose in discussion over a bipartisan bill that would require state agencies, including the University of Wisconsin System, to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism for any “law, ordinance or policy” when evaluating possible discriminatory intent at a Jan. 28 public hearing.
Daniel Hummel, a research fellow with the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on U.S. relations with Israel, said there has been increased “antisemitic rhetoric around campus” since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.
Clint Sprott, a UW-Madison physics professor who retired in 2008, started the show in 1984 as a free, public lecture. He still attends the show every year.
“[My] most favorite is seeing the smiles and enthusiasm of the audience,” Sprott said. “The show was a major part of my life for 40 years, and it is certainly fun to be something of a celebrity.”
The Wisconsin Alumni Association’s Black Affinity Group launched Black History Month with Legacy and Libations, an event celebrating the Black community in Madison.
This year’s theme, “Taking Flight,” highlighted UW-Madison student projects and alumni-owned businesses. The event featured the SoulFolk Collective, a recently established research department at UW-Madison focused on documenting Madison’s Black community stories through research.
The Epsilon Delta Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. kicked off Black History Month by hosting its 21st Style and Grace Founders Day event.
The event was held at UW-Madison’s Memorial Union on Sunday evening. This year’s theme was Black Female Empowerment.
As it turns out, expanding our vocabulary as adults doesn’t work as it did when we were children in school, said Kelly Wright, an assistant professor of language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Young people can learn new words by doing reading exercises, acing vocabulary quizzes or listening to the grown-ups around them. But as we get older, we have to approach it differently.
“Our vocabulary grows to a certain point, but then there is something that turns off, in a similar way in which we grow from a child height to an adult height. Something kicks on in our femur, but we don’t end up 11 feet tall, and the same thing happens with our language system,” Prof. Wright said. “It doesn’t mean we can’t learn new things, but after you get past that point, you have to do it actively. Say ‘Hey mind! Wake up a little!’”
The award honors PBS Wisconsin’s station-wide culture of innovation – from immersive storytelling and collaborative experimentation to cross-departmental strategies that reimagine how public media can serve, engage and evolve. The award recognized a range of projects that have expanded the organization’s reach, deepened its engagement and sparked new collaborations across platforms, including:
Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word.
Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” said Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But students will not do it.”
“I think that there was absolutely a market decision behind selecting Bad Bunny,” says Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Wisconsin who has collaborated with Bad Bunny to incorporate Puerto Rican history into his shows and music videos. “The NFL wants to expand internationally, so they are looking to target a broader market beyond the United States. He has a huge following in the United States, but this stage will also be amplified internationally by having someone like him.”
“Miracle on Ice” remains a lingering light over any American triumph in the winter games. A Netflix documentary called “Miracle: The Boys of ’80” debuts Jan. 30 to again stir up the emotions of that incredible victory for the USA men’s hockey team over the Soviet Union in the medal round of the 1980 games.
It’s a triumph that almost certainly doesn’t happen without major contributions from Wisconsin.
Tarah Connolly, a PhD student at UW-Madison, looks at a quilt from the 1870’s that is on display at the “Find Your Quilt” exhibit in the Ruth Davis Design Gallery in Nancy Nicholas Hall at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wis. Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026.
“Cracks can happen at anything below the freezing temperature, so 32 degrees Fahrenheit or zero degrees Celsius,” said Scott Bowe, a professor and wood products specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Bowe clarified that the noises, known as frost cracks, are not caused by expanding sap.
“Some people have explained it as the sap is expanding like ice and causing the crack that actually is not what’s happening. It’s actually the drying of the wood that causes the crack to happen,” said Bowe.
John Dunne, a Buddhist philosophy scholar at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, offers a helpful explanation if you’ve ever wondered why everyone seems to talk about mindfulness in a different way. Dunne says mindfulness isn’t one single thing, but a “family” of related practices shaped by different traditions, purposes and cultural backgrounds.
Through the Senior Guest Auditor Program, Wisconsin residents aged 60 and older take UW-Madison courses free of charge alongside students less than half their age. This fall, the program reached a record enrollment of more than 1,000 auditors, double the number enrolled a decade ago, according to program administrator Anne Niendorf. The program places older adults alongside traditional undergraduates in lecture halls across campus, creating multigenerational classrooms.
The Cinematheque, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s dedicated screening facility for international cinema history and fine films, returns this week for its 2026 slate — filling a niche since the 1990s by promoting movies audiences in Madison might otherwise miss.
“Sometimes good movies are brought to us through a proposed partnership with another campus department or community organization/concern,” said Jim Healy, Director of Programming at the Cinematheque. “Sometimes some movies are more relevant, like our screening of ‘Slap Shot’ last January in honor of Paul Newman’s centennial.”
Last year, just as she was finishing a teacher residency program through the University of Wisconsin-Madison, federal funding for the project was cut by the Trump administration.
“So we were in the spring semester and we were all like, are we going to be able to continue?” Lind said. “Are we going to still be able to get our teaching license? Are we going to have to pay this back?”
The doors of a new academic building will open, three-year-old scaffolding is expected to come down, and designs are being drawn up to revamp a historic site on UW-Madison’s campus in 2026.
Upcoming plans for development projects at UW-Madison signal another busy year of changes happening on campus. In 2025, UW-Madison notably opened a new building that houses its new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence: Morgridge Hall, a privately funded $267 million, 343,000-square-foot facility.
Former University of Wisconsin basketball player Freddie Owens is preparing to release a memoir next month that traces his path from Milwaukee’s North Side to the NCAA tournament and, eventually, a long career in coaching.
The book, “Echoes of Stark Park,” draws its name from the Milwaukee park where Owens spent much of his childhood and where he says basketball became both a refuge and a guide.
“It is exciting to bring back something so impactful and reimagine it for a new audience,” said König-Tarasevich, a professor of flute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame has selected William Lunney, Keith McCaffery and Neil Paine as its 2026 induction class.
Payne grew up in Sheboygan County and was the first of his family to graduate from college, earning a bachelor of arts in zoology in 1961 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, master of science from Virginia Tech in 1964 and a doctorate in wildlife science from Utah State University in 1975 (dissertation on beaver).
Berndt received his MFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969. Since then, he’s traveled and lived in several different places and had several different jobs, including one as a taxidermist at the field museum in Chicago.
Written by Maryellen MacDonald, a professor emerit of psychology and language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “More Than Words: How Talking Sharpens the Mind and Shapes Our World.”
Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa and moved to Wisconsin in 1925. He taught game management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the first courses for it in the country. Leopold is best known for his collection of essays “Sand County Almanac” that explains the way the natural world works and ways conservation could be used to preserve it.
Quentin Riser pursued academia, earning a PhD and eventually joining the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s School of Human Ecology, where he studies child development and family outcomes. Quinlan went into the financial world, spending nearly a decade at Principal Financial Group before becoming a financial advisor and later leading an insurance business.
“It’s designed to be a two-generational book,” Quentin Riser said. “The kids are going to ask their parents, ‘Mom, Dad, what is estate planning?’ And if the parents don’t know, they’re going to have to go look that up.”
To prove whether its methods work, the demonstration school would be required to participate in longitudinal studies through the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The school must also share its practices with other schools.
A charter school would be eligible for the designation as a demonstration school only if it is authorized by the Universities of Wisconsin’s Office of Educational Opportunity, which would select the demonstration school. Wittke said lawmakers chose the Universities of Wisconsin as the sole authorizer because it already has the infrastructure to support new techniques and conduct studies through UW-Madison’s education department.
tudents are on track to take classes in a new humanities building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall. And the athletics department plans to finish an indoor football practice facility next to Camp Randall Stadium this summer.
As those two projects wrap up in 2026, Wisconsin’s flagship public university also plans to break ground on a visitor and education center at the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, near Picnic Point.
Carrie Coon – a University of Wisconsin-Madison grad who performed with the Madison Repertory Theatre, American Players Theatre and Renaissance Theaterworks – was nominated for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role on Television for her role as Laurie Duffy in “The White Lotus.”
The HBO program led all shows with six nominations, including best drama series.
Co-authored by rofessor in the Information School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In 2025, the Universities of Wisconsin had another packed year.
The fallout from the Trump administration canceling students’ visas, federal funding uncertainty for research, the closure of a branch campus and downsizing of another, the rollout of new policies faculty called controversial and campuswide budget cuts at UW-Madison are just a few of the moments the State Journal covered.
Gabby Mullally, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is applying for residencies and plans to specialize in anesthesiology. She knows she would be working with patients during times of heightened anxiety, namely right before someone undergoes surgery.
That’s why she took an improv theater class this past semester.
The “Old Timer” is gone.
Jerry Apps told the Wisconsin stories of barns, cheese, one-room school houses and circuses. He encouraged children to eat rutabagas, made regular appearances on Wisconsin Public Television and Radio and, when he was not writing from his home in Madison or teaching at UW-Madison, could be found on his farm property in Waushara County, where deer roamed and he grew potatoes in his garden.
Apps, an award-winning author and one of the most prolific storytellers in Wisconsin history, died Tuesday at Agrace Hospice in Fitchburg. He was 91.
