University of Wisconsin–Madison

CA 100 Speech Contest – Fall 2012

On the evening of December 12, the top 21 persuasive speakers enrolled in the fall semester of Communication Arts 100 competed in the CA 100 Speech Contest. The speech contest is a long-standing tradition at the end of each semester. Teaching assistants from all sections of the course submitted the speeches of their top two …

Major Screenwriting Conference to be held at UW-Madison

From August 20-22, 2013, the UW-Madison Communication Arts Department will host the 6th International Screenwriting Research Network Conference. Founded in 2006, the Screenwriting Research Network brings together scholars, writers and researchers from across the globe to discuss the screenplay in relation to its histories, theories, values and creative practices. Previous conferences have been held in …

Murphy/Warhol

Scholar and filmmaker J.J. Murphy’s recent book, The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (University of California Press, 2012), has been winning critical praise and stimulating interest in Professor Murphy’s own experimental film work.  Noted filmmaker John Waters really liked the book and cited it in his summer reading. Wheeler Winston Dixon, professor …

Michael Xenos Awarded Major Research Grant from the Spencer Foundation

We hear a lot about the use of social media in political campaigns and movements.  But do tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube actually encourage young people to get more involved in their communities and in politics more broadly?  And if so, do these effects reinforce or counteract longstanding inequalities in political participation based on …

Making Jokes for a Living: How to Write (and Produce) Television Comedy

Comm Arts major and UW grad Ben Karlin (BA ’93) will be on campus this Friday, October 26th with his former college roommate Josh Bycel (BA ’93) to talk about their careers in television. At 1pm in 4070 Vilas, you’ll hear Ben and Josh talk about how they got their start in television and what’s …

Learning by Doing: Comm Arts Student Breaks Into TV News with a Lot of Hard Work and a Little Help from Some Badgers

What did you do last summer? Communication Arts major and budding television news reporter Elsa Robins, for one, was hard at work, building up her on- and off-camera experience and setting the stage for her post-graduate career in broadcast journalism. Elsa, a senior who is set to graduate in Spring 2013, interned for 12-weeks in …

New Comm Arts Prof. Derek Johnson Takes Inventive Approach to Media Franchises & Video Games

Unless you’re a media and cultural studies scholar or industry insider, you’re probably only familiar with the products of media franchises, such as the Spiderman movies and Marvel comic books. But Derek Johnson, one of the Department of Communication Arts’ newest faculty members, is interested not only in the final products but also the complex processes …

Recent Comm Arts PhDs

The UW-Madison Department of Communication Arts is not only one of the most esteemed undergraduate programs in the country for the study of communications, it also offers one of the premier graduate programs in the field. It was the first department in the United States to award a doctoral degree in communications, and its graduates …

Comm Arts Welcomes New Faculty

The Department of Communication Arts is thrilled to announce the addition of a number of new faculty members for the 2012-2013 school year. Professor Maria Belodubrovskaya: Among Professor Maria Belodubrovskaya’s research interests are media history, film under authoritarianism, propaganda and ideology, and Soviet film.  She addresses questions such as why did the Stalinist regime (1930–1953) fail …

100 Best Speeches

AIDS activist Mary Fisher is featured in  this New York Times article recalling her ground-breaking speech to the Republican National Convention in 1992.  According to Comm Arts Professor Stephen Lucas, her address, titled “A Whisper of AIDs,” is “as elegant a speech as any in the top 100.”  He should know, as co-editor of “Words of a Century: …