The Department of Communication Arts is delighted to announce that Professor Eric Hoyt was awarded a prestigious Vilas Associates Award. The award recognizes new and on-going research of the highest quality and significance, and offers the awardee summer salary support and research funding. Professor Hoyt won for a proposed project entitled “The Day After: Network …

As a child growing up in northwest Arkansas, Comm Arts film graduate student Lance St. Laurent was enamored of trivia, considering himself “a person full of random factoids and knowledge.” In 7th grade, a classmate recommended that he join the school’s Quiz Bowl. Brand new to the team, St. Laurent recognized his skill level when …

Professor Eric Hoyt is thrilled and honored to be among the most recent winners of a prestigious grant from National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Hoyt and his frequent collaborator, Stephanie Sapienza (University of Maryland), have received a $294,265 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for their project, “Broadcasting Audiovisual Data: Using Linked Data and Local Authority …

Congratulations to Catalina Toma on her appointment as Associate Editor of Human Communication Research. The flagship journal of the International Communication Association concentrates on presenting the best empirical work in the area of human communication. The journal has a broad social-science focus and important applications to scholars in psychology, sociology, linguistics, and anthropology, as well as areas of …

Congratulations to Erin Lee Carr (BA’10) for winning a TV Academy Award for her documentary At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal. While at UW-Madison, Carr majored in Communication Arts and studied screenwriting and independent cinema with Prof. J.J. Murphy. She worked as a media assistant in the Instructional Media Center and as a Resident …

Communication Arts alum Olivia Babler (BA‘13) was recently part of a team that uncovered a silent film from 1923 that was presumed to be ‘lost’, The First Degree (dir. Edward Sedgwick, Universal Pictures). The discovery is significant because a 2013 study by the Library of Congress concluded that 75% of American feature films produced between …

Aaron Greer, new Associate Professor in Communication Arts, met author Marsha Walker at Temple University while earning his MFA. Greer was drawn to Walker’s semi-autobiographical short stories about a girl growing up in Appalachia, Eastern Kentucky, and plotting her escape. Big Sandy is a fish-out-of-water tale, going beyond the often stereotypical portrayals of the white …

Paul’s study explores how requiring different types of reasoning (abduction, deduction, or induction) during creative problem-solving and brainstorming affects creative performance and brain activity. It has long been assumed that abductive reasoning best serves creative purposes (Dunne & Martin, 2006; Martin, 2009). Yet, there has been no reported study that manipulated reasoning type during idea-generation …

Thanks to the generosity of Kim and Kelly Kahl (BA ’89), we are celebrating the creation of the Kahl Family Media Production Professorship. Kim Kahl, a publicist, and Kelly Kahl, president of CBS entertainment, have long supported UW-Madison through their participation in alumni events and an internship program for Communication Arts majors at CBS. Kelly …

Nearly two decades ago, when Communication Arts alum Scott Broetzmann founded Customer Care Measurement & Consulting, he launched a longitudinal study to track customer satisfaction with corporate complaint handling efforts. The study was branded the National Customer Rage Survey. The 2020 results were written up in the Wall Street Journal. Congratulations, Scott Broetzmann! Broetzmann completed …