Arts & Humanities

Susan Barribeau BA’77, English, MA’91, Library & Information Studies, had no time to waste when she came across a listing for 25 sketchbooks that had belonged to Margaret and Florence Hoopes. She recognized their names immediately. It was 2008, and Barribeau — then the new English-language humanities librarian and literary-collections curator for UW-Madison Libraries — had struck gold.

In the golden age of podcasts, Jeremy Morris teaches students there’s far more to the medium than the latest buzzworthy show.

Students, staff and faculty collaborated to create “Whirling Return of the Ancestors," which highlights one tradition of the Yorùbá people in Western Africa. The gallery came about because of a collaboration between the Art History Department, the Afro-American Studies Department, the School of Human Ecology, the Ruth Davis Design Gallery and students. This is the first exhibit in the Ruth Davis Design Gallery that was formed out of a partnership with other departments at UW, Newell says.

The influence of Lloyd Barbee LLB’56, a civil rights leader and lawyer in the 1960s and ’70s, lives on through Justice for All: Selected Writings of Lloyd A. Barbee, which was edited by Barbee’s daughter and civil rights lawyer Daphne Barbee-Wooten ’75. The book includes a foreword by Wisconsin congresswoman Gwen Moore of Milwaukee, who describes Barbee’s lasting impact on the state and the nation.

In a campus tradition dating back to 2007-2008, the award celebrates women who share their exceptional scholarship with the campus and community through their dedicated work, outreach and impact.

Long before Steve Miller x’67 sang about being a space cowboy and flying like an eagle, he was a UW English major with a passion for civil rights.

History Ph.D. candidate Sergio González researches and writes about families like his own, immigrants from Mexico who have helped shape Wisconsin’s story since the early 20th century

The planning took months. For a brief moment, when emotions ran high, they almost called it off. But when the big day arrived, it was glorious. Some might even say magical. “The opening itself felt very much like a wedding,” says best-selling novelist Emma Straub MFA’08, owner of Books Are Magic, a New York City bookstore. “All of a sudden, the doors were open, and people could come in, and we just hugged everyone.”

Superhero comics address, and empower, straight white nerdy boys. That’s been true of most comics, for most of their history. But is it the genre’s central truth? For some of us, it never was. As Ramzi Fawaz, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has pointed out, superhero comics are the only popular genre in which anomalous bodies are not just tolerated but celebrated: The same thing that makes you look weird means you can save the world.