Student Spotlight

Dyptich in which Hamilton points at preserved squirrels in the UW zoological museum archive in the image on the left, and in the image on the right they are assisting with a screenprinting process in the screenprinting room in Mosse Humanities

 Hamilton at Trans the Archives event and leading a workshop on collaborative printmaking

Congratulations to CVCPS certificate student M. Hamilton on their ongoing Borghesi-Mellon Workshop series, Trans NatureCultures, which has received an additional year of funding.
The workshops are also supported by a CHE working group award, and a Division of the Arts sponsorship.

Hamilton (PhD student in Art History) and collaborator Ellie Kincaid (PhD student in English), in partnership with Dr. Jake Brunkard (Plant Biology & Genetics), Dr. Sarah Ensor (English), and Dr. Sami Schalk (GWS) bring together events, discussions, podcast interviews, archive interventions, and most recently a printmaking workshop with Professor John Hitchcock (Art) and Fresh Hot Fridays.

Trans NatureCultures workshops are a space for collectively considering the materiality, the histories, theories, and praxes of being trans and being a scholar, being an artist, being a person participating in and with the world.

Bio: M. Hamilton is a researcher and artist; a dissertator in the department of Art History at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a 2025 graduate of the Studio Art MFA program at UW in the
performance and time-based media area. Hamilton earned their BA in Art History with minors in
Sculpture and Intermedia and Appalachian Studies from Berea College, in Berea, Kentucky in 2021.
Hamilton’s research focuses on queer trans relational methods in ecological art practices, and on ongoing land-relations in capitalist ruins.

 

 

Student Spotlight Archive

Headshot of Chushan Wu on the Brooklyn Bridge

Chushan Wu
(Ph.D. Candidate, Curriculum and Instruction with a Minor in Visual Cultures)

Congratulations to Chushan Wu on her recent publications “The Politics and Infrastructures of Affect in the ‘Battle’” in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, “History of the present of the right to play, affective governance, and making exclusion in joy” in Critical Studies in Education, “Epistemic coloniality and politics of knowledge in punctuation marks reform” in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, as well as she advances towards the completion of her doctoral dissertation Children’s Play with Joy and Happiness as Affective Governmentality: Fabricating (Dis)abilities and Exclusions. 

Chushan Wu is a Ph.D. Candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research draws on post-theories (post-structuralism/post-foundationalism/post-humanism/post-colonialism), affect theory, and visual culture studies to critically examine educational practices and objects. Her current focus is on problematizing the seemingly natural relations among childhood, play, and joy. However, her interests are not confined to a single direction but enjoys engaging with diverse subjects, objects, and phenomena in education and contemporary life.

Email: cwu343@wisc.edu