Musicologist Barbara Milewski Wins New Yorker Caption Contest
Professor Barbara Milewski Wins
New Yorker Caption Contest
by Maki Somosot '12
2/2/2011
Barbara Milewski
Easton, Pa.
Associate Professor of Music Barbara Milewski recently won first place in the New Yorker's nationwide cartoon caption contest. The weekly contest attracts millions of participants nationwide. The winner of the contest boasts the caption with the greatest number of votes from the public and is judged by the New Yorker editorial team.
The cartoon captions are considered a long-time tradition of the New Yorker and are a mainstay in American pop culture for their often witty and punchy wordplay. Submissions are inspired from a weekly idiosyncratic cartoon drawn by New Yorker cartoonists.
Milewski's cartoon consisted of a restaurant client with a ring of bees clustered around his neck, in the middle of placing an order to the waiter. She accordingly captioned this image with: "And some fresh flowers for the table."
Milewski's academic specialty lies in 19th- and 20th-century Polish musical nationalism, while her research on the music of the Nazi concentration camps has also garnered much attention. In 2008, she released an annotated CD, "Ballads and Broadsides: Aleksander Kulisiewicz's Songs from Sachsenhausen," featuring a camp survivor's documentation of his experiences in musical form.
