Fifty years ago, everyday life on the UW-Madison campus came to an abrupt halt, as a sit-in against the Dow Chemical Company erupted into violence. On Oct. 18, 1967, Madison police officers in riot gear forcibly removed anti-war demonstrators from the Commerce Building, now known as Ingraham Hall.
Twelve students are part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s new Center for Religion and Global Citizenry. This center comes after the Lubar Institute for the Study of Abrahamic Religions closed last year due to a lack of funding.
Enter Room 2401 of the UW’s Humanities Building these days, and you’ll likely find Daniel Grabois tinkering with keyboards, speakers, microphones, pedals and all kinds of high-tech gizmos that now litter the space.
Socrates can’t pay your rent. But the University of Wisconsin-Madison Odyssey Project is convinced that the classics can change lives.
Doug Bradley is a veteran of the Vietnam War. But his view of the United States’ most contentious military conflict is different than many of those who saw combat.
UW-Madison will host a panel of three experts to discuss its 2017-’18 Go Big Read book, J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Steve Miller, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a former UW-Madison student, is coming back to campus — for a good cause.
Danez Smith, St. Paul native and poet published by Minneapolis-based Graywolf Press, was announced Wednesday as one of five finalists for the National Book Award in poetry.
Proceeds from the ticket sales and additional donations will benefit the Chancellor’s Scholarship Program at UW-Madison.
George Moses Horton published a book of poetry in 1829, when he was still a slave in North Carolina. He went on to write several volumes, which never earned enough money to buy his freedom — though he became a frequent presence on campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he wrote love poetry on commission for students. Horton was finally set free by the Union Army in 1865, moved to Philadelphia and continued to write until he died.
During half a century of painstaking research that gradually brought the Dictionary of American Regional English into being, its staff, friends, and benefactors have found many occasions to celebrate its progress, volume by volume starting in 1985 and ending just a few years ago with the publication of the final Volume 6, accommodating some 60,000 words that are often missing from other dictionaries because they are used only in parts of our vast nation.
Americans tend to think that we’re a pretty homogeneous nation, in terms of our vocabulary. Yes, there are Southern drawls, and there’s Boston and Brooklyn and Appalachia and Minnesota, but the words themselves, we believe, are pretty much the same. But there are often significant regional differences, and these are beautifully explicated in the Dictionary of American Regional English, the six-volume study of America’s dialects, affectionately known as dare.
It’s a big year for Jane Austen, with books, festivals, statues and even currency commemorating the 200th anniversary of her death.
When Lawren Brianna Ware moved up from Alabama to Wisconsin she just wanted to explore the arts in a new place. Snowy Madison was a far cry from her warm, southern home. Being in a new place can be daunting and for any of us who have ever moved, one of the first questions we ask ourselves is, “what is there to do around here?”
UW-Madison’s Center For Healthy Minds is providing its “Kindness Curriculum” to preschool teachers. Thousands of teachers have requested the curriculum, including Sesame Workshop. The researchers at the Center For Healthy Minds consulted on kindness episodes for the 47th season of “Sesame Street” premiering Sept. 18 on Wisconsin Public Television.
Inside the confounding, windowless labyrinth of UW-Madison’s Mosse Humanities Building, horn professor Dan Grabois is busy setting up his classroom for the new school year. The walls are freshly painted, there’s new carpet on the floors and in a tangle of boxes surrounding him, there’s more than $160,000 in electronic music equipment waiting to be unpacked.
When Daniel Grabois opens EARS to the public Friday night, there could be a line out the door.
University of Wisconsin professor John Hall is going to witness and write the history of the military’s fight against violent extremism. It will undoubtedly be a fascinating inside look at life inside the Pentagon that his students would jump at the chance to read.
African American children fail and drop out of school at an alarmingly high rate, but providing them with skilled teachers who bring African American culture into the classroom can reverse that trend. Gloria Ladson-Billings, an internationally acclaimed scholar of education at UW–Madison credited with the concept of “culturally relevant pedagogy,” discusses hip hop as a transformative educational tool.
Taylor spends most of the year teaching right here at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Mead Witter School of Music.
UW-Madison’s First Wave program, the only full-tuition hip-hop scholarship at a Big Ten university, has confirmed it is not accepting any applications for the 2018-19 academic year. This comes amid other potential sweeping changes to the First Wave, which recruits spoken word artists, rapper and poets from around the country.
Bizmaroon, doodinkus and splo. For over 50 years, a group of intrepid lexicographers have been documenting words like these ? regional terms and phrases that were once popular in states like Wisconsin, Kansas and Tennessee. Collected together in the Dictionary of American Regional English, the words make up a fascinating repository for old-fashioned, funny-sounding and unmistakably local language quirks across the United States.
Laura Schwendinger, a professor of composition at the UW–Madison since 2005, has received a steady stream of commissions to compose music over the past decade. She released a CD of chamber music in 2013 titled “High Wire Acts” with grants from UW–Madison and the Columbia University Ditson Fund.
For the incoming director of the Chazen Museum of Art, art is an idea, just like the museums that contain it.
The exhibit, “Wisconsin Without Borders: A Global Initiative,” highlights the products that are made as part of the 4W Initiative — Women & Wellbeing in Wisconsin & the World.
Noted: Berens studied broadcast journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and went on to work with MTV on their election-season “Choose or Lose” campaign.
Cellphones, laptops, battery-operated flashlights, our electronics are getting smaller and our need for energy is getting larger. So what if there was a way to take those items and mix them with your everyday routine to create an eco-friendly way to recharge them? That’s the bright idea of Marianne Fairbanks who has two degrees in fiber arts.
Robert Enright was studying justice for 10 years when he hit a wall.
Noted: Carrie Coon, who after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison performed with the Madison Repertory Theatre, American Players Theatre and Renaissance Theaterworks before moving to Chicago, was nominated for outstanding lead actress in a limited series or movie for “Fargo.”
If you think scientists have it bad today, spare a thought for the early philosophers – some even got burnt for heresy. Philosopher Steven Nadler and graphic artist Ben Nadler talk us through their book, “Heretics!”
If you’ve been dying to see the musical Hamilton, or you’ve seen it and love it, this story is for you.
Sarah Marty, professor with the UW-Madison division of continuing studies, has been in “the room where it happens” to see “Hamilton” four times.Now she’s delving deeper into the “Hamilton” phenomenon in a six-week summer course dedicated to the award-winning musical that highlights a story that is so American.
Memorial Library, too, is going Spanish by hosting a special display titled “Don Quixote Through the Ages,” with books, musicals and other scores from the UW-Madison Libraries collection through Aug. 10.
With simple, natural prose, Heather Swan, writer, lecturer, beekeeper, examines the changing world of the honeybee, a creature that is far grander and more impactful than meets the eye.
After attending the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Ben McCready pursued other career options until he decided to take his own advice to “follow your bliss.”
It took a transatlantic ship, enormous crates, special gantries, and before all that a high-tech laser scan — but finally Jim Dine’s latest artwork is installed at the Chazen Museum of Art.
In their new graphic book “Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy” by Steven Nadler and Ben Nadler, the father and son duo take readers on a historical journey starring a group of thinkers who used reason and evidence to triumph over the authority of religion, royalty and antiquity.
A native of the Midwest, Liz Anna Kozik spent much of her childhood surrounded by prairies. Yet it wasn’t until Kozik left her home in Naperville, Illinois, for her undergrad studies in Rhode Island that she began to appreciate their beauty. She opted to go to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin – not just so she could be close to the prairie again, but also to study the grassy habitat’s history.
A UW-Madison professor says it’s the golden age for podcasts, but he’s worried some of those podcasts may soon disappear.
Noted: “The way people are doing murals now is wanting to get their work out there as an artist,” said Buie, a 2010 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s MFA program. “They’ll find a building, they’ll find a space, they’ll put up a mural. But it’s not reflective of the community.
We asked publishers, press directors, editors, scholars, and other insiders for their views on the state and future of academic publishing. Of the people we contacted, including the heads of nearly every one of the Association of American University Presses’ 143 members, 46 sent back responses to our questions. We got back a surprisingly wide range of views — and good ideas on how university presses are preparing for an uncertain future. Contributing: Dennis Lloyd, of UW Press.
Noted: Nass earned a degree in art education from UW-Madison. Along with having artwork featured in corporate, museum and gallery collections, she also teaches colored pencil classes nationwide.
A native of the Midwest, Liz Anna Kozik spent much of her childhood surrounded by prairies. Yet it wasn’t until Kozik left her home in Naperville, Illinois, for her undergrad studies in Rhode Island that she began to appreciate their beauty. She opted to go to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin – not just so she could be close to the prairie again, but also to study the grassy habitat’s history.
Jeremy Morris is a futuristic thinker. While some are heralding podcasts as a trendy new medium, Morris is worrying about what will become of them in the future when we may not use iPhones, iPods or MP3s. Morris, an assistant professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, founded PodcastRE, a project that aims to archive podcasts.
The conference component, to primarily be held in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Gordon Commons, will be packed with seminars on topics ranging from social media strategy to composition techniques. It currently boasts a roster with speakers and educators like Vig, the rocker Kip Winger, jazz pianist Ben Sidran, and president of Warner Bros.’ music operations Paul Broucek.
Cartoonist Lynda Barry became famous for depicting her troubled Seattle childhood in books like Down The Street, Come Over, Come Over, and The Good Times Are Killing Me, which she turned into a successful stage play.
Every year, hundreds of pink plastic flamingos roost on UW-Madison’s Bascom Hill. Although this tradition has become a fundraiser for the university, it began decades ago as a prank.
A Madison artist is teaming up with researchers to challenge beliefs about the connection between hip-hop and violence at local music venues.
Want to better understand why voters in Greater Minnesota have taken to Republicans so strongly in the last two elections? University of Wisconsin political scientist Katherine J. Cramer can help.
The National Endowment for the Humanities announced Monday the resignation of Chairman William D. Adams, effective today.
One of this young century’s great literary feuds began on April 18, 2011, right here in Madison, at Union South.
Lucas Hnath set out to write a sequel to Ibsen’s famous play, imagining the future of protagonist Nora Helmer. His producer, Scott Rudin, proposed a playwriting method you might call dial-a-feminist. Hnath reached out to several academics, including Susan Brantly, who teaches Scandinavian literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Toril Moi, an Ibsen scholar at Duke and the author of “Sexual / Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory.”
“Jump Around” is 25 years old this week. It got some extra publicity last year when House of Pain attacked the Donald Trump campaign for using its hit song.
Noted: Erisman, an infantry officer who served 10 years in the Marines, including two tours of Iraq, learned of the reading group through a University of Wisconsin-Madison alumni newsletter. His first meeting was at last month’s book group to discuss “Ceremony” by Leslie Marmon Silko.
When she first moved from Monona to Madison’s East Side, 14-year-old Avenna Pickett felt like she didn’t know anybody — until another girl told her about Performing Ourselves.Avenna joined the dance group, which is taught by students from the UW-Madison Dance Department and meets weekly at East Madison Community Center and elsewhere.
Every generation faces its own particular challenges, its own dragons to slay. For the post-World War II baby boomers, the generation that came of age in the mid-1960s, the defining beast of the era was the Vietnam War. Some went to fight in it, some got draft deferments or left the country to avoid it, some took to the streets of cities and college towns across the county to protest it. Some did all of the above.
The last thing Lillian Zwilling thought she would be was a music video star. It took her until age 90 to realize her 6:03 of fame. Created by the UW Hollywood Badgers — a team of student filmmakers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison — Lillian’s video uses singer/songwriter Rachel Platten’s “Nothing Ever Happens if You Stay in Your Room” to tell her story as a resident of St. Mary’s Care Center on Madison’s southwest side.
A tiny, blonde 7-year-old girl stands in front of a chalkboard, hand whirring away at a complicated math formula in a scene from the new movie, “Gifted,” starring Chris Evans, Jenny Slate and Octavia Spencer.
Ask Peter Krsko to define the art he creates and he might pull a wasp comb out of his backpack and draw attention to its hexagonal cells.
This poem appears in “The Golden Shovel Anthology,” a collection that honors Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize.
