2011-12 was a highly successful school year for the Comm Arts department with numerous faculty members and graduate students receiving prestigious awards, fellowships, and distinctions. Indeed, the number of accolades is too great to list here in its entirety, but what follows are some of the more notable accomplishments earned both inside and outside UW-Madison:
- Emeritus Professor Tino Balio was named a 2012 Wisconsin Academy Fellow, the highest level of recognition conferred by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters.
- Professor Stephen Lucas received the Outstanding Alumni Award from his alma mater, the Penn State Department of Communication Arts and Sciences.
- Professor Robert Asen won a Vilas Associate Award for research from the UW-Madison Graduate School and a Institute for Research in the Humanities fellowship. Professor Asen was also awarded the Kohrs-Campbell Prize in Rhetorical Criticism from Michigan State University Press for his recent book, Invoking the Invisible Hand: Social Security and the Privatization Debates.
- UW Graduate School Research Awards were granted to Professors Robert Asen, Karma Chávez, JJ Murphy, and Robert Glenn Howard.
- The UW-Madison Center for the Humanities‘ First Book Project Award, which is funded by the A.W. Mellon Foundation, was given to Professor Karma Chávez.
- Professor Jonathan Gray was awarded a H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and the UW-Madison Graduate School.
- Professor Eric Hoyt, who will be joining the department in the fall, received the University of Southern California’s 2012 Ph.D. Achievement Award. Additionally, his Media History Digital Library team won the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association’s 2012 Electronic Reference Site Award.
- Christopher Cwynar received a prestigious Doctoral Fellowships Program two-year fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.
- Elizabeth Ellcessor, who completed her PhD in Comm Arts this spring, received a Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant from the Division of Social and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation.
- Josh Shepperd and Nick Marx both received A.W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowships in 2011-12. Josh Shepperd was also awarded a Rockefeller Archive Center Grant to conduct dissertation research in the Center’s archival collections in Westchester County, New York.
- Chancellors Fellowships from the UW-Madison Graduate School were awarded to Gang Jing, Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, and Michael Braun.
- Elsa Gumm, Lindsay Hogan, and Kelly Jakes received University Fellowships for dissertation research from the UW-Madison Graduate School.
- Lindsay Hogan was elected as the Graduate Student Representative to the Board of Directors of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies.
- At the National Communication Association‘s 97th Annual Convention last November, graduate students Kyurim Kyoung and Michael Braun won Top Student Paper prizes in the Political Communication and Human Communication & Technology divisions, respectively.
- Emily Acosta Lewis, who just completed her PhD in Comm Arts, won a Top Paper Award in the Entertainment Studies Interest Group for the 2011 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference.
- Doctoral student Sarah Murray received the Outstanding Thesis/Report Award recognizing exceptional work by a Master’s student in the University of Texas at Austin Graduate School. Sarah won the award for her Master’s degree thesis completed there last year.
- Danny Kimball won the Vance and Betty Kepley Award for Excellence in Communication, which is awarded to one graduate student in the Comm Arts department each year who has excelled as a teacher and educator. Danny lectured Comm Arts 346, Critical Internet Studies, in both the fall and spring semesters.
- Sarah Florini was selected as a 2012-14 A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow through the A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Program at the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities. Sarah, a doctoral candidate at Indiana University, will be mentored at UW-Madison by Professor Robert Glenn Howard.
Congratulations to all of the honorees on their accomplishments, and a sincere thanks to all of our faculty, staff, and students for another wonderful school year.