• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
UT Shield
Ransom Center Magazine
  • Sections
    • View All Articles
    • Art
    • Authors
    • Books + Manuscripts
    • Conservation
    • Digital Collections
    • Exhibitions + Events
    • Film
    • Literature
    • Photography
    • Research + Teaching
    • Theatre + Performing Arts

May 9, 2016, Filed Under: Research + Teaching

Listening closely to the Ezra Pound radio controversy

Fellow-2016-17-circleMarius Hentea is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Gothenburg University in Sweden.

Hentea received a 2016-2017 Woodward and Bernstein Endowment fellowship from the Ransom Center to support his research.

Originally from Romania, he was raised in Indiana.

Tell us about your research.

My research at the Ransom Center will examine the controversy surrounding Ezra Pound’s indictment for treason. This research will be part of a larger project about treason and authorship in the post-war period (1944 –1949). I will use treason trials to think about the larger social and political obligations imposed upon authors in four countries (France and Norway as formerly occupied countries, the U.S. and the U.K. as unoccupied countries). Treason is a way for a nation to frame its self-understanding, so examining how authors were specifically targeted allows for a clearer interpretation of how the postwar period envisioned the duties of authors during the war and in the postwar reconstruction.

2016-2017 Fellow Marius Hentea.
2016-2017 Fellow Marius Hentea.

Which collections at the Ransom Center are most relevant to your research?

The Ezra Pound collection, which richly documents Pound’s activities in the 1930s, his wartime radio broadcasts, the treason controversy upon his return to the U.S., and then his internment at St. Elizabeth’s outside Washington, D.C. I will also consult the Ransom Center’s holdings related to Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

Outside your primary research interest, are there other collection items at the Ransom Center that you hope to see?

I’ll be happy to let serendipity lead the way…but the holdings in modernist literature are so rich, I’m sure that I’ll find something if I have the time!

Can you share a particularly exciting moment of discovery while working in other research libraries or special collections?

For my biography of Tristan Tzara (MIT Press 2014), I was particularly happy to work in Romanian archives, which have not been studied intensively. In the Bucharest city archives, I was able to find materials related to Tzara’s education that let me reconstruct his formal schooling, down to the assigned textbooks. I was able to find a previously unknown formal complaint Tzara wrote as a university student, in which he states that a university professor insulted him (and a fellow student) in class. Tzara would soon turn the tables on that with Dada, but the letter was a fantastic discovery, as it shed light on why Tzara was sent to Zurich.

Beyond researching, what is at the top of your must-see/do list while in Austin?

The cafe and restaurant culture, eating good barbecue, going to a Longhorn football or basketball game, and enjoying the city’s parks with my family (my wife and two small boys will be coming as well).

Fellowship image 2016_large
Norman O. Dawn, special effects card for Call of the Yukon, 1926; J. W. F. Herschel, Halley’s Comet, 1836–7; Page from commonplace book owned by Edith May Southey Warter, undated; Frank Reaugh, Windy Day, painting: oil on canvas, 1900; Anna Atkins, Peacock Feathers, cyanotype, 1845.

Primary Sidebar

Print Edition

Ransom Center Magazine Spring 2025

Search

Recent Posts

  • Fellowships Awarded to 46 scholars
  • Benjamin Gross Appointed Associate Director of Research Services at the Harry Ransom Center
  • Celebrating Gabriel García Márquez’s Global Journey: Q&A with the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia
  • De Macondo al Mundo. Una celebración del recorrido global de Gabriel García Márquez
  • Lorne Michaels Lands at the Ransom Center
  • Literature and Change: Flair Symposium 2024
  • Mark Sainsbury on W. S. Merwin
  • Nancy Cunard in the Studio
  • Visualizing the Environment: Ansel Adams and His Legacy
  • Freedom to Write, Freedom to Read: The Story of PEN
  • Milton in Phoenix
  • “Into the Emptiness” by Frederick Seidel

Archive

Footer

© Harry Ransom Center 2025
Site Policies
Web Accessibility
Web Privacy

UT Home | Emergency Information | Site Policies | Web Accessibility | Web Privacy | Adobe Reader

© The University of Texas at Austin 2025