Q: Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself? A: I am one of the linguists in the department, a syntactician by training. I study the structure of the English language and how …
Month: December 2019
Digital Mappa takes online scholarship to a whole new level
A Digital Humanities project developed by Professor Martin Foys is changing what is possible in medieval studies—and beyond. The project, an open-access software platform called Digital Mappa, can be used for editing, annotating and publishing …
Celebrating 50 years of the Writing Center
Did you ever procrastinate on an essay, forcing you to stay up all night writing? This November, the Writing Center celebrated its 50th anniversary of undermining the continued existence of that collegiate rite of passage. …
Green Card Voices shares immigration stories with the help of UW Students
A recent book on the experiences of high school-age immigrants and their families includes the work of several UW-Madison English students. Mark Salamone (’19), Elizabeth Wahmhoff (’20), and Sam Wood (’22) were among the Badgers …
Teju Olaniyan, 1959-2019
The English Department mourns the loss of Teju Olaniyan, Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and Wole Soyinka Professor of the Humanities. Professor Olaniyan was a visionary thinker, a dedicated mentor, and a most beloved colleague and …
Alumna Profile: Emily Brix
While an undergraduate at UW-Madison, Emily Brix (’16) co-majored in English and Spanish and participated in the Undergraduate Writing Fellows Program. Following graduation, Emily worked as a paralegal in Madison before returning to UW …
Professor Ainehi Edoro’s “Brittle Paper” challenges conventional understandings of African literature
How do you decolonize African literary culture? In 1962, a group of prominent African writers gathered at Makerere University, Uganda, to answer that question. They agreed that the project of decolonizing African literary culture required …
Introducing new faculty and staff, Part 1
We have been lucky enough to welcome so many new people into the department this year that we have to split up our introductions over two newsletters! Look for another round of intros in the …
UW Students make linguistics fun with the Grammar Badgers website
When you think about “grammar,” are you plagued by childhood memories of learning a complicated series of rules about where to put commas, how semicolons work, or when to put an apostrophe in “its”? Knowing …
American Dreamers Online: One Professor’s Approach to Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities
The increasingly diverse student populations on university campuses around the country provide educators with exciting opportunities to innovate their teaching methods. To understand how professors in the English Department have responded to changing student needs, …