The world is a terrible mess right now. Climate change, government upheaval, warfare have many of us on edge and filled with anxiety about the future. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture asked its Design and Innovation graduate students to contemplate the question, “what if everything turns out OK?”
In a sunlight-dappled room in UW-Madison’s Science Hall, between historical maps from around the planet, rests a world unlike the others: the fantasy land of Middle-earth.
Curated by Mark Fonstad, the exhibit showcases the hand-drawn maps, writing tools and stories behind the atlas depicting the “Lord of the Rings” realm his mother Karen Wynn Fonstad created.
Launched this spring, The SoulFolk Collective is the first research lab to be housed in UW-Madison’s Department of African American Studies. The group is made up of about a dozen undergraduate and graduate students and is led by Jessica Lee Stovall.
“As a Black studies professor,” Stovall said, “I’ve been really interested in the ways that we can create learning and research environments that are Black affirming, that center Black joy and Black liberation, Black organizing.”
We don’t always see this level of direct confrontation when a group member is accused of being dangerous, according to Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin.
“Most will tend to continue the friendship,” Calarco said. “This is because when someone close to us – or even similar to us – engages in violent or toxic behavior, we’re less likely to blame them for their actions than we would be if we saw the same behavior from someone to whom we’re not close.”
Given how well this summer’s concerts at Camp Randall Stadium were received, music fans might not have to wait another 28 years to attend another.
“The overall success of these shows demonstrates that we are capable operationally of hosting more shows and there is definitely an appetite and demand for more in the future,” said Mitchell Pinta, deputy athletic director and chief revenue officer for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s athletics department.
Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) announced plans in late June to cancel “University of the Air” along with three other legacy shows in part because of federal and state funding challenges.
Like the Skobot, most new A.I. technologies developed by Native scientists are designed for a specific language community. Jacqueline Brixey, a computer scientist formerly at the University of Southern California and now joining the University of Wisconsin, created a chatbot called “Masheli” that can communicate in Choctaw. Drawing from a collection of animal stories, the chatbot can listen and respond to users in both English and the target language, helping conversational skills.
The camp is organized in collaboration with Dr. Michael Notaro, director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. With prior funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Notaro and his team have led similar camps in Beloit, Madison, and Wisconsin Dells.
However, future programming is uncertain. Federal support for the camps ended earlier this year when NSF grants were discontinued. While funding remains in place for this summer’s sessions, organizers are seeking alternative sources to continue beyond 2025.
Dr. Michael Notaro, director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, launched the program several years ago.
“I think that’s inspired by my son Hayden,” Notaro said. “He’s autistic and a wonderful boy. My wife is also autistic. And based on my desire to support and foster neurodiversity, we created three STEM camps.”
After three successful shows in the last month at Camp Randall — the first in 28 years — Madison is back on the map for the biggest musical acts. The city, its boosters and the university should do everything it can to keep it that way.
If there was a word to describe the essence of 2023 UW-Madison MFA graduate Meg Kim’s Invisible Cartographies, it would be lush: in language, in landscape, in memory, in longing. The winner of the 2023-2024 New Delta Review Chapbook Prize, Invisible Cartographies is rooted in place—geographies both physical and psychic made visible only by Kim’s careful practice of excavation, bred by her “mass of wanting.”
Hardtke said the department recognizes the importance of education and books as part of rehabilitation and maintains libraries at all institutions, offers books on electronic tablets and has educational partnerships with the University of Wisconsin System and the state’s technical colleges.
Among his losing battles was the 1970s fight over merging the University of Wisconsin in Madison with other state campuses to form the UW System. He was against it, as were his constituents on the Madison campus. He fought enacting a state lottery and opposed building the so-called SuperMax prison that Tommy Thompson later admitted was a big mistake.
Emily Callaci’s history of the international feminist movement examines the influence of their intellectual and political victories. The University of Wisconsin–Madison historian describes in “Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor,” that modes of protest were part of an emerging, dynamic wave of left-feminist activism.
Callaci’s book marks a significant contribution to the new Wages for Housework literature and serves as a reminder of the campaign’s true aims. Weaving together capsule biographies of five of its founders, it offers a history that reflects Wages for Housework’s global scope and radical ambitions.
All four of the anonymous researchers asked to assess its merit were sceptical. But Berger and his colleagues were undeterred. Earlier this year, they published an updated version of their study, offering a deeper dive into the evidence they had gathered from the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. The approach paid off: two of the original reviewers agreed to reassess the science – and one was won over.
“You rarely see that in peer review,” says John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a member of Berger’s team.
Coldplay performed their first-ever Madison concert on Saturday with a sold-out show at Camp Randall Stadium.
The concert was one of the first Camp Randall has seen since The Rolling Stones in 1997 and was the band’s first performance in Wisconsin since 2009.
Two Madison Area Technical College students had just left the Kollege Klub bar near the UW-Madison campus early Saturday when one of them thought she recognized Coldplay’s lead singer.
Coldplay’s sold-out Madison show at Camp Randall Stadium Saturday had about 58,000 attendees, according to a UW-Madison official. It was the latest stop in the band’s Music of the Spheres world tour, which began in 2022 and spans 225 nights in 80 cities across 43 countries.
All in all, Coldplay at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison July 19 went off without a hitch — and without a viral moment.
There were only two arrests and no other ejections at the concert, according to Marc Lovicott, the executive director of communication for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department.
Ainehi Edoro, associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the literary blog Brittle Paper, says the novel marked a turning point. “For a long time, queer characters in African literature were either invisible or treated as symbols of crisis, like their presence was a sign that something had gone wrong,” she says. “So when Dibia wrote a novel that centred a gay Nigerian man as a full human being, that mattered. He pushed back against an entire archive of erasure.”
Camp Randall will welcome 58,000 people Saturday night for Coldplay’s first show in Wisconsin in 16 years.
That will be about 8,000 more people in the crowd than at each of Morgan Wallen’s shows last month, according to officials.
Rebekah Willett, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies children and media, said she often hears from parents whose children run into upsetting content that’s recommended by YouTube’s algorithm. (One child, she said, looked up baby animal videos, which led to videos of animals giving birth, which led to videos of humans giving birth.)
The sold-out Coldplay show coming Saturday to Camp Randall Stadium, like the two shows by country music superstar Morgan Wallen at the stadium three weeks earlier, is a game-changer for the city, said the president of Downtown Madison Inc.
Coldplay made Wisconsin history in October when it became the first concert announced at Madison’s Camp Randall Stadium in nearly 28 years.
Now, eight months later, the show is finally here — even though country superstar Morgan Wallen made sure the Chris Martin-led British band wasn’t the first to actually perform there. Wallen had two concerts, on June 28 and 29.
In 1873, just before becoming a student at the University of Wisconsin, La Follette heard Edward Ryan, soon to become the state’s Chief Justice, give a commencement speech. Ryan bluntly defined the central questions of the coming era: “Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic freemen, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?” This question would animate La Follette’s career as he tried to live up to UW president John Bascom’s insistence that students accept the obligations of citizenship and their duty to serve the state.
Coon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison grad who performed with the Madison Repertory Theatre, American Players Theatre and Renaissance Theaterworks, was nominated in 2017 for lead actress in a limited series or movie for “Fargo,” and in 2024 for lead actress in a drama series for “The Gilded Age.”
“It feels like home when I hear it,” says Kelly Elizabeth Wright, an assistant professor of language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who grew up in Tennessee. “It’s from where I was raised. But it makes me feel included and welcome. And I think that’s part of why people are embracing it, because it has this capacity to make others feel included and welcome.”
Generative AI may “hallucinate” and pollute the internet, but it is a powerful tool for scientific inquiry, we learn. Then, 50 years of the History of Cartography Project is expected to result in six massive volumes of maps and analysis.
“The theme and the ethos of this record is sort of affirming that Puerto Rican culture in the face of cultural and physical displacement of Puerto Ricans,” said Meléndez-Badillo, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is attending one of the concerts this weekend.
Richard J. Davidson, founder of the University of Wisconsin Center for Healthy Minds, reflected on the Dalai Lama’s influence on neuroscience.
“When I first met His Holiness in 1992, there were three scientific papers published on the effects of meditation,” he said. “Now there are thousands. This has been a legacy that will live on for many, many years and has transformed our understanding of the human mind and the human heart.”
Earlier this year, Dean Robbins brought his zeal and skill for succinct communication to his first book for adults, “Wisconsin Idols: 100 Heroes Who Changed the State, the World and Me” (Wisconsin Historical Society Press).
Author Kashana Cauley began her career as an attorney before shifting to writing for TV (including the animated Fox series “The Great North” and “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah”) and as a novelist.
“I’m a first-generation college student, so nobody in my family really knew what college was for, how to get there or what it is you might do with such a degree. I don’t think that’s uncommon among Black American families; only two or three generations of us have been going to college. So I did my undergrad in economics and political science at the University of Wisconsin, but I had no idea how you got a job because I didn’t know you were supposed to get jobs through your friends’ parents; my parents sent me to college so I didn’t have to work on the assembly line at General Motors like my dad, so I was completely confused.”
The Black Males in Engineering (BME) video series, led by UW-Madison School of Education faculty member Dr. Brian Burt, recently received a Silver Telly Award in the Campaign – Education & Training category. The honor recognizes non-broadcast video campaigns created for general educational purposes and underscores the series’ impact on addressing critical gaps in STEM education support.
Russell, who was Madison’s 2024-2025 youth poet laureate and is a First Wave Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, described the collectives’ long-term goal to create infrastructure that supports creative careers.
rofessor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A UW-Madison alumnus and former Badgers football player, Peters began his career in Madison in the early 1960s and was a prominent figure in the city’s development scene into the 2000s. He designed and built two of the high-rise condominiums now overlooking Lake Monona, including the metallic Marina building, among numerous other distinctive projects Downtown, on the UW-Madison campus and throughout the region. Many are still standing — and standing out — today.
The Daily Cardinal was named a national finalist for the Corbin Gwaltney Award for Best All-Around Student Newspaper by the Society of Professional Journalists.
When Miso Kwak and Emily Nott met during their early days as doctoral students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a creative and transformative friendship took root.
In 2023, their bond deepened in a feminist disability studies class taught by Prof. Sami Schalk.
On the last weekend in June, artist and recent University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate Ava Albelo organized “Cog in the Machine” at Next Wave Studios, a multimedia production space on Madison’s east side.
Albelo said she funded the project with a grant from the UW-Madison Art Department. She hoped younger people would come to the show “and be interested in the artwork and ask questions and enjoy the music.”
Dozens of people were ejected during the two Morgan Wallen concerts at Camp Randall Stadium over the weekend, a UW-Madison Police Department spokesperson said.
UW-Madison officials are calling the two concerts put on by country music superstar Morgan Wallen at Camp Randall Stadium over the weekend the biggest in state history.
Duke University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are both assigning “James” by Percival Everett as their common reader. The novel is a fiercely satiric and darkly funny reimagining of Mark Twain’s American classic, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” told from Jim’s point of view. It won both the National Book Award for 2024 and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
It’s been Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, Mike Tyson, Pat McAfee, Tyrese Haliburton, Drake, Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Brooks & Dunn and Moneybagg Yo, among other notable figures.
Who walked out with Morgan Wallen in Madison on Night 2? Former Packers quarterback Brett Favre.
More than 20 people were ejected from each of country music star Morgan Wallen’s concerts at Madison’s Camp Randall Stadium, on June 28 and 29, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison police.
UW-Madison police had 24 contacts at Saturday night’s Morgan Wallen concert at Camp Randall Stadium, according to police.
Country music superstar Morgan Wallen put on a performance at Camp Randall Stadium Saturday night that started and ended with fireworks.
Summerfest’s talent team has been dealing with several cancellations (including from Whiskey Myers, Nessa Barrett, Nettspend, Bone-Thugs-N-Harmony and Milwaukee rap star Chicken P, who was arrested), and finding some solid last-minute replacements, including University of Wisconsin-Madison alum Yung Gravy and Bow Wow.
Donning a Badgers football jersey, Wallen led the night’s final singalong in a Wisconsin name-checking “The Way I Talk.” It was a pretty good way to welcome stadium concerts back to Madison.
Although there were other publications focused on Black lesbians, most were geared toward their own cities, according to Emerald Rutledge, a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research interests focus on 20th century Black gay and lesbian literature. Aché (1989-1993) and Onyx (1982-1984) — two Black lesbian-focused outlets — were based in San Francisco; Venus (1995-2007) was originally based in Atlanta but eventually moved to New York.
“You could see [the magazines] as a first encounter for people looking for community who may be closeted or socially isolated,” said Rutledge.
At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Department hosts an elder-in-residence for a week each semester. Writers-in-residence at the Illuminating Discovery Hub, housed within UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, can craft anything from play scripts to music with the Institute’s support — so long as the work features or portrays science in some way.
Artists who don’t fit the bill there can consider two options at UW–Madison’s Division of the Arts: the Interdisciplinary Arts Residency Program or the International Visiting Artist Program.
Written by rofessor of Scandinavian Studies, Folklore, and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I also love to collect vintage library items, so I suppose my dream find would be any vintage apparel related to the South Central Library System. Years ago, I was lucky to adopt a decommissioned card catalog from UW-Madison, and it now holds my vintage button collection for clothing repair.”
A trio of trailers emblazoned with Morgan Wallen’s image arrived at Camp Randall Stadium Wednesday morning, bringing loads of sound, stage and lighting equipment for what will be the venue’s first concert in 28 years.
The Grammy-nominated country artist will perform two shows this weekend at the home of “Jump Around,” marking a historic return of live music to the stadium that last hosted a concert when The Rolling Stones performed in 1997.
Camp Randall Stadium will host its first concert in 28 years when country superstar Morgan Wallen performs Saturday and Sunday evening.
Morgan Wallen is days away from creating more Wisconsin history. In 2023, the country music star became the first artist to headline a Wisconsin stadium for two consecutive nights when he kicked off the North American leg of his “One Night at a Time” tour at American Family Field.
Now, he’s going to be the first musical artist to headline a concert at Madison’s Camp Randall Stadium in the 21st century, with the stadium’s last concert coming in 1997.
A true shift in what parenting means is more likely to come when raising kids isn’t categorized along the lines of “his” and “hers” at all, said Jessica Calarco, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Gender is more fluid than we give it credit for,” Calarco said. “Often these tropes become increasingly stereotypical the more they get used.”
Popular country singer Morgan Wallen is coming to Camp Randall Stadium this weekend, bringing thousands of people to Madison. This summer, the stadium is opening its gates for concerts for the first time since 1997.
Corey Pompey, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Marching Band, guest-conducted the La Crosse Concert Band during a rehearsal Tuesday at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
The American School Band Directors Association is hosting their Regional Conference in La Crosse, and in partnership with the band, the association invited Pompey to serve as both guest conductor and keynote speaker.
Emily Auerbach has co-hosted “University of the Air” for 30 years. She’s a UW-Madison English professor who directs the UW Odyssey Project, so she described her work on the show as “a labor of love.” Along with Norman Gilliland, she interviewed university faculty and other guests on a range of topics, such as the Salem witch trials, the Harlem Renaissance and dyslexia.
“It’s a way to take the brilliant minds that are at the university … and share that learning with a broader audience,” she said.
Abloh was born in Rockford, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, to parents who immigrated from Ghana. A quiet but charming kid who was obsessed with skateboarding and music, he attended Catholic high school, then the University of Wisconsin, where he graduated with a degree in civil engineering. Abloh also received a masters in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and it was in this period when he started to become interested in the intersection of fashion, culture, and music.
Since 1981, Jim Latimer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison emeritus music professor, has been leading the Capitol City Band and conducting hundreds and hundreds of concerts. Ronald Reagan had just become president when Latimer first started conducting the band. “Is that right?” Latimer laughs. “I hadn’t thought of it in that context. But it has been a labor of love over these many years and I am so happy and proud to be involved with it.”
