As we look back on the year, we want to thank you—the students, faculty, staff, and community members who made this all possible. Please read on for a few highlights and stories from this past year.

There There in Wisconsin

On April 24, the Center for the Humanities welcomed high school students and teachers from 20 schools across Wisconsin to the UW-Madison campus for the annual Great World Texts student conference. This year's program focused on Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author, Tommy Orange's 2018 novel, There There. In an engaging evening conversation at Madison Central Public Library, Orange also spoke to nearly 300 members of the Madison community.

Participating students shared a wide range of projects in response to the novel—from creative writing to original music and art—and had the chance to meet author Tommy Orange, who delivered the keynote address, hosted a lunch for student essay-contest winners, and joined the student poster sessions. We share a few project highlights here; for more, please check out this slideshow.

Chippewa Falls High School, Chippewa Falls

In There There, attention is called to the often hidden yet desperate crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women. This project shares the story of Jessica Smith Gidagaakoons, an indigenous survivor and UW-Superior graduate who works to bring light to and solve this crisis facing indigenous women. Students connected with Gidagaakoons to highlight her survivorship and the stories of additional women—survivors, victims, and those still missing.

Osseo-Fairchild High School, Osseo

In A Chronicle in Denim, Osseo-Fairchild student Madeline Marroquin-Norby embroidered symbols and topics relating to There There on a denim jacket. The inspiration for this Great World Texts project comes from another Native denim jacket displayed in a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In Madeline's own words, "this jacket can be worn in protest, or to represent the strength and stamina of Native people, especially those from There There."

During the 2023-24 Great World Texts in Wisconsin program, high school teachers and students throughout the state will read and engage with the 2019 novel Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli.

In Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. Through ephemera such as songs, maps, and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way.

In addition to the Great World Texts student conference on Monday, April 15, Luiselli will deliver a public Humanities Without Boundaries talk Monday evening at the Madison Central Public Library, presented in partnership with Wisconsin Book Festival. Please stay tuned for details.

Please Welcome the 2023-24 Public Humanities Fellows

Each year, we invite applications for the Mellon Public Humanities Graduate Fellowship, designed to provide advanced graduate students in the humanities with experience outside of academia. By placing fellows in community partner organizations around Madison, the program facilitates the reciprocal sharing of resources and expertise, and highlights the significance of the humanities both on and off campus.

We're excited to announce the 2023-24 fellows, made possible by generous funding from the UW-Madison Graduate School and Humanities Without Walls:

Diego Alegria, PhD candidate in Literary Studies, will join WORT Community Radio as a Community Access and Development Fellow.

Sadie Dempsey, PhD candidate in Sociology, will join the League of Women Voters of Dane County as a Civic Engagement and Community Partnerships Fellow.

We hosted or co-sponsored more than 45 events and workshops during the 2022-23 academic year to engage our campus, community, and beyond, including: Regina Rini (York University); Noam Chomsky (in collaboration with the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice); Jo Handelsman (UW-Madison); Sianne Ngai (University of Chicago); Mae Ngai (Columbia University), and Cajetan Iheka (Yale University).

This included two Humanities NOW conversations, which provide intellectual resources for understanding complex and urgent events. In November 2022, ahead of the release of the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever film, we hosed Humanities NOW/Wakanda Forever to discuss Wakandan aesthetics, the cultural significance of the film, and the comic book tradition. In March 2023, we hosted a discussion on Humanities NOW: Roe at 50 to discuss "the anniversary that wasn't" with panelists from the UW-Madison history department, law school, and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin.

Every semester, we host a series of popular Friday Lunch events to support the research of faculty from UW-Madison and the University of Wisconsin System. These informal, dynamic discussions are hosted over lunch at Memorial Union to foster academic discussion and provide a space for interdisciplinary dialogue and community building across campus. This year, we were honored to have Friday Lunch with Laila Amine (English, UW-Madison); Claus Elholm Andersen (German, Nordic, and Slavic+, UW-Madison); Gerardo Licón (Latin American and Latinx Studies, UW-Eau Claire); Adam Stern (German, Nordic, and Slavic+, UW-Madison); Ainehi Edoro (English and African Cultural Studies, UW-Madison); and Sarah Ensor (English, UW-Madison). Please stay tuned; we'll announce the 2023-24 Friday Lunch series soon.

Each year, the Center provides an opportunity for working groups of students and faculty to come together outside of the classroom to investigate interdisciplinary topics. Support from the Mellon Foundation and UW-Madison alumni Nancy Borghesi (BA ’69, Economics) and David Borghesi (BBA '70, Accounting) allows these groups to produce research and teaching innovations as well as hold public talks and events.

This past year, the Psychedelic Pasts, Presents, and Futures workshop hosted a series of activities bringing scientists, humanities and social sciences scholars, students, and members of the public together for conversations about psychedelics in society beyond clinical science and drug development. In addition to lectures and roundtables, the workshop hosted nature walks and tours at Allen Centennial Garden, the D.C. Smith Greenhouse, and Muir Woods. Stay tuned for more information on the 2023-24 workshops and ways to get involved.

As we chart our upcoming and future events seasons, who would you like to hear from? The suggestions we receive from you will help our Steering Committee, composed of faculty and community partners, create a slate of exciting and diverse speakers.

The Center for the Humanities affirms our commitment to public humanities partnerships as essential projects of hope that reflect the necessity of the humanities and the Wisconsin Idea. We call for students to serve as "Humanities Responders" by creating projects that serve and bolster the current work of community organizations, nonprofits, cultural institutions, and public agencies. We continue these projects via the Graduate Public Humanities Exchange (HEX) program and HEX-U program for undergraduates.

Here's a few highlights of recent or ongoing student projects:

Rewey is a UW-Madison senior from Minneapolis studying Neurobiology, with certificates in Studio Art 2-D and French. For her HEX-U project, Rewey collaborated with Monroe Street Arts Center to teach a five-week course on graphic medicine to grades 6-12. Students learned the basics of making comics and applied this tool to medical and health storytelling. They created their own medical comic based on their own experiences or health interests.

Froncek and Reglos are seniors at UW-Madison. Froncek is studying Anthropology with certificates in Global Health and American Indian and Indigenous Studies and is currently a student intern at the Office of Inclusion Education. Reglos is studying Global Health with certificates in Health Policy and Southeast Asian Studies. Together, Froncek and Reglos are interested in the intersection of public health and health equity. ECCHO is a program dedicated to investing in and uplifting BIPOC women from Wisconsin with the purpose of facilitating collaboration to drive policy change and transform local systems to meet the needs of communities. In collaboration with ECCHO, Froncek and Reglos will build a website to further publicize ECCHO’s community work and share stories.

In collaboration with Union Cab of Madison, Ramachandran revived the cooperative’s library space, and conducted oral history interviews with current co-op members to build out the library’s archive. He also planned a community barbeque for Union Cab members and their families to celebrate the library's reopening.

In partnership with 9 Lives Rescue, a foster-based cat rescue that serves south-central Wisconsin, Ghosh's project will support the feral cat communities in Madison by reducing overpopulation through a sterilization program, ensuring safe habitability and access to resources, and spreading awareness about community cats’ needs and spay-neuter education to underserved communities.