The Ransom Center has awarded more than 75 fellowships to postdoctoral, dissertation and independent researchers studying topics ranging from the works of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez to the relationship between the music of vaudeville and early silent film.
Recipients will conduct research with materials that span the Ransom Center’s collections in art, the performing arts, photography, rare books, and literary manuscripts.
“The Ransom Center’s fellowship program leads quite directly to original scholarship in the humanities,” said Ransom Center Director Steve Enniss. “It is one of the ways the University of Texas fulfills its mission as a premier teaching and research university.”
While most fellows are affiliated with an academic institution, others are independent researchers, including Louie Palu, a documentary photographer and filmmaker. His project on the working methods of photographer David Douglas Duncan will use Duncan’s archive to explore war photography in the 1950s and 1960s. According to Palu, studying Duncan is “key to understanding a new history of war photography from the point of view of the photographers themselves.”
Since 1990, the fellowship program has supported more than 1,000 research projects that require substantial on-site use of the Ransom Center’s collections and result in the publication of books, journal articles and doctoral theses. The 2016-17 fellows reflect the global stature of the Ransom Center, representing 13 countries as well as 21 U.S. states.
Fellowship types vary, with awards from one to three months long, travel stipends or dissertation fellowships. Several individual donors and organizations fund the program.
