UK postgraduates receive fellowships to work with Ransom Center collections

The Harry Ransom Center will host six scholars from the United Kingdom as part of the 2015-2016 International Placement Scheme conducted and funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The AHRC provides fellowships to doctoral students and early-career researchers from the United Kingdom to study at international libraries and research institutions. The Ransom Center is one of the seven host institutions for the program. The other institutions are the Library of Congress, the Huntington Library, Japan’s National Institute for the Humanities, China’s Shanghai Theatre Academy, the Smithsonian Insitution, and the Yale Center for British Art.

The AHRC’s program provides scholars with access to renowned research collections and expertise, enhances the depth, range, and quality of research activities, and enables networking with other international scholars.

The AHRC recently announced the names of six academics who will conduct research at the Ransom Center for residences of two or three months. The scholars’ projects are as diverse as the Ransom Center’s holdings. Projects include:

• Alison Clarke, University of Liverpool: “Art Dealing, Authenticity and Attribution in the Harry Ransom Center Archives.”
• Marc Farrant, Goldsmiths College: “Literary Life: A study of Coetzee’s relation to Beckett in the Collections of Beckett and Coetzee at the Harry Ransom Center.”
• Natalie Ferris, University of Oxford: “‘Ludic Passage’: Abstraction in Post War British Literature.”
• Evelyn Heinz, Birkbeck College: “A study of the John Rodker Papers at the Harry Ransom Center.”
• Helen Stevens, King’s College London: “William Wetmore Story and His Friends: Writing sculpture and sculpting writing in mid nineteenth-century Rome.”
• Rachel Wallace, Queen’s University of Belfast: “‘Gay is Good’: Gay Rights and Social Justice in Belfast and Boston post-1945.”

For the scholars, researching at the Ransom Center will provide them access to primary source materials and collections that relate to their work. “The Harry Ransom Center holds an invaluable collection of letters by nineteenth-century artist Charles Fairfax Murray and other correspondents associated with Agnew’s, the firm of art dealers at the focus of my Ph.D. research,” says fellowship recipient Alison Clarke. “At this stage in my research career, the fellowship is also a wonderful opportunity to exchange thoughts and ideas with other scholars from the U.S. and around the world: it could take my project in directions I had not previously even considered.”