When University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate Matthew Desmond won a Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction Monday, it came as no surprise to anyone who has read his 2016 book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.”
Eight UW-Madison academic staff are being honored for their contributions to UW-Madison—including studies on unconscious bias in hiring—with 2017 Academic Staff Excellence Awards. Chancellor Rebecca Blank will present the awards.
Matthew Desmond, who earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on Monday won the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for a book based on research conducted in Milwaukee.
The fences are up, crews are at work and as soon as late next year musicians could be playing in a new UW-Madison concert hall at the corner of University Avenue and North Lake Street.
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.
The actress, headlining season three of the FX series alongside Ewan McGregor, opens up about her “fear” of starring in two shows airing at the same time and playing “sad, insane people.”
Art history students Yusi Liu and Alex Polach could be commuting to class this fall on a Metro Transit bus of their own creation.
I’m sitting in a small conference room at the Madison Concourse Hotel with 11 strangers at tables arranged so we’re all facing each other. Under other circumstances, it would be uncomfortable.
Film fans still trying to see this year’s Oscar-winning films can check off two features on their lists by attending the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison.
Observant Badgers fans may be wondering why legendary UW band director Mike Leckrone has been missing from the NCAA tournament basketball games.
Though the weather was cold, the colorful costumes of Runways of the World at Union South Thursday night made the night warmer.
Deep spending cuts in President Donald Trump’s budget proposal could threaten the federal funding UW-Madison researchers rely on to investigate Alzheimer’s disease, asthma and other ailments, and slash support for programs that help low-income students afford college, according to scientists and campus officials.
Noted: While the number of children’s books featuring African-American characters has grown in the last decade, the number of books by black authors has barely budged, according to data collected by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education.
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NEA and NEH money can also function as a multiplier. Many grant recipients use an agency’s seal of approval as a basis to solicit matching funds from charitable foundations, often at a rate of three private dollars for each federal dollar, according to Lea Jacobs, associate vice chancellor for research for arts and humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Noted: Fans and musicians who knew Stubblefield were scheduled to gather Friday night in New York City for a tribute concert. Stubblefield, known as the most sampled drummer in history, also will be honored posthumously with an honorary degree from UW-Madison at a May 12 commencement ceremony.
Noted: Now in “Transparent,” I’m still putting lessons learned at the Rep to work on the show. I also can’t seem to get away from people with connections to the Badger State. I’ve reunited with Judith, and our cast includes two graduates of UW-Madison, Jill Soloway and Amy Landecker, as well as Madison native Brad Whitford. Now if they’d only bring brats and cheese curds to the set, I’d be one happy guy!
Noted: Now in “Transparent,” I’m still putting lessons learned at the Rep to work on the show. I also can’t seem to get away from people with connections to the Badger State. I’ve reunited with Judith, and our cast includes two graduates of UW-Madison, Jill Soloway and Amy Landecker, as well as Madison native Brad Whitford. Now if they’d only bring brats and cheese curds to the set, I’d be one happy guy!
As students shuffled back and forth between classes in Birge Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus these past few weeks, they looked curiously at what Peter Krsko was up to. Up on a 14-foot-ladder, the Slovakian-born artist was building a plywood sculpture around one of the pillars in the entrance hall. Inspired by the plants he saw in the greenhouses at Birge Hall, Krsko constructed the sculpture of slender pieces of wood to climb 22 feet up the pillar like a vine, exploding outward like a geyser of water.
Annika Collier took more classes about Swedish than she did in computer science while attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the seven years she’s worked at Epic Systems, the giant Verona-based company that specializes in complex medical software, that’s never been an issue, she told a small room of UW students at the Union South.
The Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has announced that its director of thirty-three years, Russell Panczenko, is stepping down this summer.
UW-Madison professor of virology Yoshihiro Kawaoka doesn’t teach classes on campus.
The fans of Martha Glowacki’s cabinet of curiosities titled “My Arcadia” — part of the permanent collection at the Chazen Museum of Art since 2000 — are in for a treat: The Chazen is devoting an entire gallery to the local artist’s work this spring.
Every time a patient comes out of an operating room at UW Hospital, so does a lot of used-up stuff.
Reporters digging into the ills of society and a newspaper picturing one of those ills on its front page, while weighing the ethics of such reporting, are contenders for the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics.
Stubblefield died Saturday at the age of 73 from kidney disease. Before his death, he had been selected by the UW–Madison Committee on Honorary Degrees and Chancellor Rebecca Blank to receive an honorary degree May 12 at the Kohl Center prior to spring commencement.
Noted: The “Deutschlandlied” was written by a poet named Hoffmann von Fallersleben, “a good bourgeois liberal,” according to the German cultural historian Jost Hermand, a retired professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Noted: “Initially, Fauset’s work was dismissed as sentimental and Victorian, primarily because she dealt with ‘women’s issues,’ centering on the marriage plot,” Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, said.
Two decades ago only about 9 percent of children’s books published in the U.S. were about people of color. Things have changed since then, but not by much. On Wednesday, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Education School revealed that in 2016, it counted 427 books written or illustrated by people of color, and 736 books about people of color out of about 3,400 books it analyzed. That adds up to 22 percent of children’s books.
Last year, I appeared as a contestant on Jeopardy! I came in third. Which sounds pretty good if you ignore the fact that the game is played with only three contestants. Unless you also bear in mind that more than 70,000 took the online test last year — the first step in getting onto the show. Only about 450 new players appear on air each season, which still put me in the top 0.65% — an unheard-of acceptance rate in the field of scholarly publishing, where I’ve worked for the past two decades.
When I first speak with Virgil Abloh in Paris, he is scheduled to fly back to Chicago in two days. Technically Chicago is home—it’s where his wife Shannon and daughter Lowe live, and it’s a two-hour drive from Rockford where he was born and raised—but he is rarely there. He takes roughly 350 flights a year. His phone is forever buzzing with texts and calls and emails. He is a man steeped in work to the point that even the notion of “home” is difficult for him to reconcile with the rest of his life.
From second grade Matt Onstad knew he wanted music in his life, but he didn’t know what tool it would take.“ I so deeply wanted to play the saxophone but I couldn’t get a single note out,” he said over the phone. “It was ugly.” He didn’t mesh with a sax and said it broke his heart almost immediately. It wasn’t until Dave Hoffmaster, music teacher at Beaver Dam High School asked that he give the trumpet a shot. Even though drums were his second choice, the trumpet somehow clicked.
Noted: The concert’s first half — a solo recital by virtuoso pianist Christopher Taylor — featured three pieces by America’s first great concert pianist, Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Taylor displayed breathtaking technique in the vigorous rhythms of “The Banjo,” one of Gottschalk’s bravura pieces whose inventive use of the piano’s upper register reportedly thrilled Victorian America.
A rape trial from the 17th century is the basis of Artemisia, an opera by Madison composer Laura Elise Schwendinger, premiering in New York City Jan. 7.
The first time the National Endowment for the Arts made a big grant to support a project in rural communities, it was in Wisconsin.
Supporters of the arts and humanities on Thursday sounded unanimous alarm over an article in The Hill reporting that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s administration plans to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“We’re happy to have anyone that’s interested,” Anthony Di Sanza, UW-Madison professor of percussion, said. “We’re offering opportunities for students and people who have never tried anything like this before.”Di Sanza is hosting the daylong event with the UW-Madison Percussion Program Saturday at the Mead Witter School of Music at UW-Madison.
Reports circulated Thursday, the day before the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, that his first budget would propose the elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Noted: Claims of higher crime rates at hip-hop events need quantifying, and UCAN has enlisted undergraduate students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Community and Environmental Sociology to take a look at police and crime data related to Madison performance venues. The data has been compiled and will be analyzed this spring.
Putting pen to paper – or, more commonly, fingers to keyboard – can be one of the most arduous tasks surrounding the writing process. Ideas swirl in the mind, but executing on that vision sometimes seems like an impossibility.
Noted: We reach the end of the musical month on Jan. 29 with the third Schubertiade performance, presented by Martha Fischer and Bill Lutes of the Mead Witter School of Music at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. These recreations of the evenings that the composer and his friends enjoyed are built around a theme in the composer’s life and music. This year’s motif is “Circle of Friends,” and soprano Emily Birsan will be featured along with other stellar soloists. Yours truly made it to this event last year, and the memories remain fresh nearly a year later. The event starts at 3 p.m. in Mills Hall. .
Reviewed: Mark Seidenberg’s important, alarming new book, “Language at the Speed of Sight.”
With the use of vibrant colors and cartoon-inspired imagery, Audrey Hansa tells the stories of women. Beginning at a young age, the University of Wisconsin student used art as an outlet to express herself and her emotions.
Noted: Wilde was born in Milwaukee but he lived most of his life near Madison. He studied art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning bachelor and master’s degrees from the institution. He taught studio art courses there from 1948 until retiring in 1982.
Noted: Garcia grew up on Milwaukee’s south side and attended WPCA’s youth arts programming. She is an alumna of Milwaukee Public Schools. Before joining WPCA, Garcia served as a program director at Partners Advancing Values in Education. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in English.
Johannes Wallmann remembers the day he found his people.
Noted: She kept after archivists at the University of Wisconsin until they checked an all-but-forgotten closet and found what she was looking for, a videotape of Edward Albee’s play “The American Dream,” recorded in 1963, but never broadcast. She had seen it on a listing of the places in which the producer David Susskind’s programs were housed.
The 2017 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Education goes to a pair of University of Wisconsin researchers.
Noted: The Roman historian Tacitus captures the mood. He records the empire from its beginning, in 509 B.C. (which he says was full of glorious heroes) to his time in about 100 B.C. (which he keeps apologizing for). “He’s constantly saying, ‘I’m sorry for telling you about yet more murders that the autocratic emperors have committed against their own subjects, and more rapes, and more sexual perversion, and more records of excessive dining, eating, and, you know, sumptuary practices,’” says Alex Dressler, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But Romans before Tacitus said basically the same thing, Dressler says. The more money and power the Romans acquired, the more they felt like their nation was getting indulgent and lazy, and therefore the more they looked backwards to a time before they got what they wanted. The wanting, it seems, mattered more than the having.
Some artists at UW-Madison put all that energy of disappointment with society on stage. In a series of movement and dance, UW-Madison Professor Li Chiao-Ping and students capture the essence and conflict of life. The “Weight of Things” confronts what we as humans place value on and what we see as important. The show also addresses the hardships of women and the constraints our society has placed on them, having to live up to standards of beauty while constantly battling within themselves to have as much power as men.
This past weekend, the WUD Art Gala made its debut, offering people the chance to observe student work to be featured in University of Wisconsin’s Illumination journal, an undergraduate humanities publication. The Gala only happens once a year, this time popping up in a cozy room on the second floor of Memorial Union.
Noted: After graduating from Rufus King High School in 2008, Iglesias got a full tuition scholarship to the University of Wisconsin-Madison through the First Wave program, an outlet for artistic students inspired by hip-hop. Casal, a UW-Madison alum, was the program’s creative director at the time, becoming “like a big brother of mine,” Iglesias said.
Chover worked as a professor of math at UW-Madison for 36 years, officially retiring in 1993 but continuing to teach part-time for five additional years.
There’s no doubt that alumni of the University of Wisconsin go on to achieve greatness, but how often do students get to witness their success first-hand?
Noted: Nardi is currently teaching graphic design at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Art Department as a lecturer.
Lynda Barry likes to say things that most people shouldn’t or couldn’t. A short conversation about her job as a teacher gets very interesting very quickly.
Matthew Desmond’s work studying poverty as part of his Ph.D. program at UW-Madison led him to move into some of the poorest neighborhoods in Milwaukee. There, he meticulously researched the book chosen for the 2016-2017 Go Big Read, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.”
The First Folio is coming to Madison, one of the last stops in a yearlong tour designed to exhibit a copy of the first printed collection of Shakespeare’s plays in every U.S. state, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The precious and historic volume, laid open to the page bearing Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, will be on display from Thursday to Dec.11 at the UW-Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art.
A new musical feat has been accomplished at UW Madison, and it is ready for you to see this weekend.
It will be a chance to meet amazing historical figures like Maya Angelou, Frida Kahlo, and Frederick Douglass while also supporting a great cause on Thursday at the University Club in downtown Madison as the Odyssey Project will host its 2nd annual “Night of the Living Humanities” fundraiser.
It will be a chance to meet amazing historical figures like Maya Angelou, Frida Kahlo, and Frederick Douglass while also supporting a great cause on Thursday at the University Club in downtown Madison as the Odyssey Project will host its 2nd annual “Night of the Living Humanities” fundraiser.
