Essays & Essayists
2013 - 2023
Steve Ackerman
September 13, 2021: “Wisconsin’s Changing Climate”
Respondent: Jon Martin
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Sandra Adell
September 11, 2023: “And Then The Casinos Came: Casino Gambling, Black Women and Addiction”
no respondent
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R. Bruce Allison
May 8, 2023: “The Role of Trees in Wisconsin’s Historical and Current Climate And Ecology, And Their Anticipated Future Role.”
no respondent
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Tian G. Andresen
April 11, 2022: “Hot Times in Cold Places: Changing Arctic Processes”
no respondent
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Emily Auerbach
March 11, 2013: “Pride, Prejudice, and Proliferation: A 200th Birthday”
Respondent: Joseph Wiesenfarth
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William Aylward
December 14, 2015: “Discovering Troy”
Respondent: Barry Powell
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Mary Helen Becker
October 13, 2014: “Gregory of Tours: Sixth-Century Bishop, Historian, and Saint”
Respondent: Jim Ebben
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Harvey Black
December 9, 2019: “Science Reporting: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—More or Less”
Respondent: Steve Paulson
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Thomas Broman and Erika Janik
February 13, 2017: “How Does ‘Public History’ Reach its Public? The Case of Wisconsin 101”
no respondent
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Daniel Bromley
November 13, 2017: “Why Aldo Leopold Has Failed: Rescuing Environmentalism from Moral Obligations”
no respondent
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Joyce Bromley
March 14, 2016: “Barriers to German Reunification”
Respondent: Sabine Gross
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Joshua Calhoun
December 14, 2016: “Shakespeare’s First Folio”
Respondent: no commentator
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Donna Carnes and Pauline Boss
September 12, 2016: “The Myth of Closure”
Respondent: no commentator
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Robin Chapman
February 8, 2021: “Occupation Poet: Where Do Poems Come From?”
Respondent: Rita Mae Reese
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Roseanne Clark
December 12, 2022: “Mental Health and Early Relationships: A New Public Health Agenda”
no respondent
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Charles Cohen
May 11, 2015: “A Nice Jewish Boy Redacts a Translation of the Qur’an”
no respondent
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Jane Collins
December 10, 2018: “The Politics of Value”
Respondent: Michael Bell
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Kate Corby
October 9, 2017: “From Idea to Embodiment: An Open Rehearsal and Peek into Contemporary Choreographic Processes”
no respondent
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Katherine Cramer
September 11, 2017: “The Politics of Resentment in the Contemporary United States”
no respondent
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David Daniel
February 8, 2016: “An Interactive Evening of Poetry”
Respondent: Emily Auerbach and Donna Carnes
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Samuel Dennis
February 12, 2018: “Landscape Design as Social and Cultural History: A Long View”
Respondent: Ann Smart Martin
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Brenda DeVita
April 12, 2021: “The Play’s the Thing: Planning a Successful Season at American Players Theatre”
no respondent
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Robert Dott, Jr.
April 13, 2015: “Roadside Geology of Wisconsin”
Respondent: David Mickelson
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Jordan Ellenberg
May 9, 2016: “How Not to be Wrong: Why Math is Important”
no respondent
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Jo Estep
March 11, 2019: “Behind the Panels: An Examination of the Creation of Comics/Graphic Novels”
Respondent: Amber Cohen
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Nicole Fenske (substitute for Patrice Streicher)
September 17, 2018: “Functional Medicine”
Respondent: Jennifer Gurske
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Jean Feraca
May 13, 2013: “Teaching Plato’s Allegory of the Cave”
Respondent: UW Odyssey Project Students
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Charles Franklin
October 10, 2022: “2022 Mid-term Elections”
Respondent: Michael Wagner
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November 10, 2014: “Understanding the Wisconsin Electorate of 2014”
Respondent: Jessie Opoien
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Ann Frautschi
October 7, 2013: “Colonial Cooking”
Respondent: Orange Schroeder
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Margaret George
February 11, 2019: “Fiddling Around with Nero, or, Fake News from Rome”
Respondent: William Aylward
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November 9, 2015: “The Emperor Nero”
Respondent: Norman Gilliland
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Norman Gilliland
May 11, 2020: “What Has Radio Done for Music?”
Respondent: Trevor Stephenson
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May 12, 2014: “Go Ahead and Write Your Novel—I Dare You”
Respondent: Margaret George
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Amy Gilman
February 13, 2023: “The Era of the Visionary Museum Director Is Over … or It Should Be”
no respondent
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Thomas J. Givnish
September 12, 2022: “Assembly of Wisconsin Plant Communities at Regional to Local Sales”
no respondent
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Robert Graebner
April 9, 2018: “Walter Graebner: Time-Life London Bureau Chief and His Relationship with Winston Churchill”
Respondent: Gen. Lewis B. Harned
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December 8, 2014: “The Northwest Passage: An Historical, Cartographical, and Climatological Tour”
Respondent: Andrew Winters
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John Hall
September 14, 2015: “Americans’ Colonialism”
Respondent: Cary Miller
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Lee Hansen
February 11, 2013: “Diversity at the UW: An Assessment”
Respondent: Phil Certain
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Kevin Henkes
November 13, 2023: “The Recent History And Current Golden Age Of Children’s Literature”
no respondent
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Ronnie Hess
March 9, 2020: “Duck Soup, Or the Fine Art and Science of Culinary/Food Writing”
Respondent: Grazia Menechella
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Jack Holzhueter
May 13, 2019: “Aslak Lie: A Final Report on a Fifty-Year Obsession”
Respondent: Peter Thurlow
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Tom Howe
September 9, 2019: “Waste, Salvation, and Melancholia: Unexpected Legacies of the American Civil War”
Respondent: Matt Blessing
Len Kaplan
October 14, 2019: “Job: A Folksy Tale That Continues to Bite”
with Rob Czierwin, Andy Gricevich, and Jeffrey Rothstein
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Kyle Knox
November 14, 2022: “Why Music Matters”
no respondent
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Moira Krueger
September 9, 2013: “Recalls: Historical and Personal Perspectives”
Respondent: Kevin Kennedy
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Jim Lattis
May 10, 2021: “140 Years on the Frontiers: Washburn Observatory and the
Wisconsin Roots of Modern Astrophysics”
no respondent
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Margaret Lewis
December 8, 2013: “Are There Enough Women in Politics?”
no respondent
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Monica Macaulay
April 11, 2016: “Native Language Revitalization in Wisconsin”
no respondent
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Ron McCrea
March 12, 2018: “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Contributions of Women”
Respondent: Anna Andrezjewski
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April 8, 2013: “Discovering the Hidden Taliesen”
Respondent: Bill Tischler
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Jim McKeown
February 10, 2020: “Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Health Arts of Greece and Rome”
Respondent: Hanna Golab
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Gene Miller
September 8, 2014: “Divine Kingship in Ancient Egypt: Art and Writing as the Propaganda of Pharaohs”
Respondent: Emily Auerbach
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Leonora Neville and Sarah Thal
April 3, 2017: “Songs from the Road not Taken: Amateur Reflections on Coloratura”
no respondent
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John Nichols
November 12, 2018: “Election Wrap-Up, Analysis and Implications”
Respondent: Laura Dresser
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T. Michael Nork
March 14, 2022: “Color My World: What Color Vision Teaches Us About Genetics, Eye Disease and Evolution”
Respondent: Dr. James N. Ver Hoeve, PhD
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Kirill Osopovat
April 10, 2023: “The history of Russian popular attitudes toward authoritarianism and how those attitudes are reflected in 19th and 20th century Russian literature.”
no respondent
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Martha Greene Phillips
May 14, 2018: “Border Country”
Respondent: Stanley Temple
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Joseph (Jay) Ranney
March 13, 2023: “Bridging Revolutions: A Southern Judge Who Took On Slavery, the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan”
Respondent: Prof. John Hall
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April 8, 2019: “A New Birth of Freedom?’ Wisconsin and the Age of Expressive Individualism”
Respondent: Dean Strang
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Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
July 13, 2020 (rescheduled from April 13): “The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History”
Respondent: Charles Cohen
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Rita Mae Reese
May 9, 2022: “Poetry as Vaccine”
Respondent: Jodi Vander Molen
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Sue Riseling
November 11, 2019, “The Challenge of Protecting the University”
Respondent: Kristen Roman
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Veronica Rueckert
September 14, 2020: “Outspoken: Why Women’s Voices Get Silenced and How to Set Them Free”
Respondent: Mary Lang Sollinger
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John Schaffer
October 8, 2018: “So, What Exactly IS Jazz Anyway?”
Respondent: Johannes Wallman
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March 9, 2015: “The String Quartets of Bela Bartok”
Respondent: Matt D’Anbrosio
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Sarah Schaffer
October 10, 2016: “From Poem to Song: How Variant Musical Settings Offer Interpretive Insights”
Respondent: Robin Chapman
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April 14, 2014: “Commissioning New Music: From Concept to Premiere”
Respondent: Sally Chisholm
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Michael Schuler
November 9, 2020: “Whither Humanism? A Brief Survey of its Religious and Cultural Despisers”
Respondent: Michael May
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November 11, 2013: “In the Absence of Authority”
Respondent: Michael May
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Nick Schweitzer
November 8, 2021: “The Last Freie Gemeinde?”
no respondent
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March 10, 2014: “Evolution in the Courts”
no respondent
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Dan Shea
October 12, 2020: “Thoughts on Opera in Madison Since the 1960s”
Respondent: Karlos Moser
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Janice Sheppard
March 8, 2021: “My Time in Prison: The Spiritual Path into and Out of Prison”
no respondent
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Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
December 14, 2020: “Mapping Blackness: An Intimate
Cartography”
Respondent: Dr. Ethelene Whitmire
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Charles Snowden
October 12, 2015: “How Human Fatherhood is Informed by Non-Human Primates”
Respondent: Lauren Papp
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Scott Spoolman
October 11, 2021: “Wisconsin's Extraordinary Stories of Geology and Natural History”
no respondent
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Clint Sprott
December 13, 2021: “Self-organization: Nature's Intelligent Design”
no respondent
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Trevor Stephenson
December 11, 2017: “Chopin and Debussy on a Mid-Nineteenth-Century Viennese Piano: Trevor Stephenson Discusses the Sound World of an 1855 Bösendorfer Grand”
Respondent: Norman Sheppard
​
February 16, 2015: “From Quills to Hammers: The Evolution of the Piano”
Respondent: Norman Sheppard
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Dean Strang
October 9, 2023: “Why Injustice Trumps Justice—and Why Understanding That Matters”
no respondent
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Olga and Vadimir Trubetskoy
March 13, 2017: “Mikhail Tsvet and His Discovery of Chromatography, a ‘process that separates molecules but unites people’”
no respondent
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Andrée Valley
February 14, 2022: “The Venice Biennale Before and During the Pandemic: An Exhibitor’s Perspective “
Respondent: Paula Panczenko
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John Valley
February 10, 2014: “Zircons from Hell?”
Respondent: Robert Dott, Jr.
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Michael Wagner
November 14, 2016: “Wrap-up Analysis of the 2016 Elections”
no respondent
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Craig Werner and Doug Bradley
May 8, 2017: “‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War”
no respondent
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James Zellmer
March 12, 2012: “15 Seconds – SIS vs. the Legacy Media”
Respondent: Richard Askey
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Note: Complete lists of essays and essayists and entertainers of the Club, as well as of members and officers from 1877 to 1977, will be found in The Semi-Centennial Book of the Madison Literary Club, 1877-1927, and in The Centennial Book of the Madison Literary Club, 1977. Essays are held by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.