Biography
Liam Kane-Grade teaches business communication and research to BBA students. Prior to joining the Wisconsin School of Business, he taught composition and creative writing courses at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, UW-Platteville Baraboo/Sauk County, and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
At UW-Platteville, he advised the student newspaper, the Exponent, and supervised the publication’s interns. He served as English placement coordinator for the university’s Baraboo/Sauk County branch campus, where he designed a multi-measures placement procedure in collaboration with colleagues at UW-Platteville’s Richland branch campus.
Before becoming an educator, Kane-Grade worked for six years as a reporter in Wisconsin and Silicon Valley, covering the tech sector, education, municipal governments, and environmental news. He wrote for newspaper, magazine and digital publications and developed long-standing source relationships with officials and background sources. He draws on this experience when teaching students about effective interviewing, networking, concise writing and speaking, anticipating reader objections, and vetting reports’ content before distributing them.
Kane-Grade holds a B.A./J.B.A. in Journalism, English, and Classics from UW-Madison; an M.A. in Journalism from Stanford University; and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota. In his graduate programs, he focused on data analysis; quantitative and qualitative analysis of communication, especially broadcast coverage; novel writing; and audio journalism.
Kane-Grade designs course material so students can develop practical communication skills while gaining fluency with theoretical perspectives that they can use to adapt to new professional settings. Over the course of a semester, he helps students to design, test, refine, and implement writing processes tailored to their strengths. He centers student voices by asking students to explicate the merits and downsides of communication strategies they identify in case studies and readings, encouraging productive in-class debate and the exploration of multiple perspectives, and drawing connections between course content and students’ internship and professional experiences.