Harry Ransom Center Announces 2026–2027 Fellows

The Harry Ransom Center is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2026–2027 research fellowships. This year’s cohort consists of 47 postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and independent researchers who will travel to Austin from seven countries and 15 US states to immerse themselves in the Center’s collections.

Their research interests reflect the geographic and disciplinary breadth of Ransom Center’s holdings, including the circulation of photographs in colonial India, changing visual representations of the wilderness in North and South America, the early history of true crime television programming, and scholarly editions of Percy Shelley’s correspondence and poems by Lord Byron and the Brontë sisters.

Now entering its 37th year, the Ransom Center Fellowship Program has supported more than 1,500 research projects that required extensive onsite use of our collections and subsequently resulted in the publication of academic monographs, dissertations, journal articles, novels, and other creative works. Fellowships lasting between one week and two months are available to doctoral students, current and former academic faculty at any career level, and independent researchers such as journalists and artists

Ransom Center fellows are members of a vibrant social and intellectual community. In addition to attending author talks, film screenings, and other public programs, they also have opportunities to discuss their research with the Center’s staff and UT faculty. We look forward to welcoming these humanities scholars to Austin and supporting their archival investigations.

Further information about our 2026-2027 fellows can be found in the table below. Learn more about the Ransom Center Fellowship Program here or email ransomfellowships@utexas.edu.

	FIRST	LAST	AFFILIATION	PROJECT
	Hessam	Abedini	University of Oregon	When the Three Magi Serve Homer: Asymmetric Hermeneutics and the Victorian Translation of Firdausi's Shahnameh
	Claudio	Aguayo-Borquez	Fort Hays State University	Capital's Wilderness: Politics of Nature and the Aesthetics of the Frontier in the Americas
	Ben	Angwin	Independent Scholar / Kingston University London	More than a "Modern Bookshop": The Significance of The Sunwise Turn and Modern Art and Interior Design in America
	Madeline	Baird	University of Connecticut	Embodied Borders: Navigating Transit Migration
	Andrew	Bozio	Skidmore College	Scenes of Dispossession: English Theater and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism
	Corinna	Cape	Fordham University	Changing Faces in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature
	Emily	Carman	Chapman University	Misfit Hollywood: American Cinema in Transition
	Eric	Carroll	Independent Scholar	Blue Skies: Sir John F. W. Herschel’s discovery of the Cyanotype
	Diletta	Cenni	IULM University - Milan	The Court of Last Resort and the Early Production Cultures of True Crime
	Clare	Charlesworth	Independent Scholar	Un/Editing Olive Schreiner's Undine
	Stefano	Colombo	Independent Scholar	Ferdinando Cospi’s Funerary Chapel in the Basilica of San Petronio: Transmitting and Transforming Memory in Seventeenth-Century Bologna
	Sophie	D'Anieri	Johns Hopkins University	Language & Crisis: Giving Voice to Violence in Jaliscan Literature and Everyday Life
	Juliana	DeVaan	Columbia University	Performance Testing: Experimental Art in New York, 1968-1992
	Joshua	Ehrlich	University of Macau	The Indian Ocean in the First Global Age of Print, 1500-1800
	Giorgia	Garilli	University of York	Care, Curation, and Lesbian Autography in the Archive
	Justin	Gautreau	University of California, Davis	Hollywood's Greatest Writer: The Life and Work of W.R. Burnett
	Javier	Guerrero	Princeton University	Ghosts in the Archive
	Anselm	Heinrich	University of Glasgow	Mid-Century Discourses Around the Formation of a National Theatre in Britain
	Stephen	Hughes	School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford	Image Worlds of Empire: The Reuse and Circulation of Photographs in Colonial India
	Clare	Hutton	Loughborough University	Finding Miss Weaver: James Joyce, Harriet Shaw Weaver and Other Lives
	Louise	Kane	University of Central Florida	Reclaiming Palms: Idella Purnell's Transnational Little Magazine and its Place in Modernist Studies
	Andrew	Kensett	Princeton University	"Another Reality": Photography, Abstraction, and the Human in the Cold War U.S.
	Sadie	Levy Gale	Institute of Historical Research	Seeing from Above: W.D. Smithers’ Aerial Photography and Imaginaries of the Southwest, 1910-1960
	Kristin	Mahoney	Michigan State University	Love’s Cross Currents: Indo-Irish Affinities, 1880-1930
	Nick	Marx	Colorado State University	Off Broadway: Lorne Michaels and the Curation of Saturday Night Live's Legacy
	Gerard	McCann	University of York	"That Dependable Refuge"? Internationalism and African Cultural Production at the Transcription Centre in the Long 1960s
	Kathleen Laraia	McLaughlin	Loyola Marymount University	Julia Margaret Cameron: Indefatigable Warrior for "High Art"
	Shaun	Midanik	University of Toronto	Picturing the Book: Tracing the Origins of the Book of Prints (1450-1800)
	Ael	Miller-Figueroa	University of Texas at Austin	The Poetics of Conquest from the American Civil War to the U.S. Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan
	Léa	Miranda	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	The Reproducible Archive—Niépce, Hamel, and the Early Circulation of Photographic Documents
	Mercie	Morris	Independent Scholar	Cataloguing the Middle Eastern Manuscripts of the Harry Ransom Center: Description, Context, and Material Study
	Aaron Coy	Moulton	Stephen F. Austin State University	A Caribbean Dictator in Washington: The Dominican Struggle for Democracy in the United States
	Tara	Murray	Yale University	The Fixity of the Photographic Image, or How Dyeing Techniques Color the History of Photographic Processing
	Claire	O'Callaghan	Loughborough University	Brontë Poems and Brontë Legacies
	Joanna	Piechura	American Studies Center, University of Warsaw	Scattered Infrastructures. Self-Curation and Autotheory in the Archives of Christine Brooke-Rose
	Lucie	Richter-Mahr	University of Oxford	Developmental Landscapes in American Fiction
	Kerry	Seed	Independent Scholar	GOOD GRIEF: A Séance of a Podcast Summoning the Life and Work of Denis Johnson
	Joseph (Joe)	Semkiu	University of Southern California	The Timbre of the Homme Fatal: Zachary Scott’s Queer Voice, the New Hollywood of Flair, and 1940s US Queer Radio Culture
	Ola	Sidorkiewicz	University of Chicago	PEN Club Centre for Writers in Exile - International PEN's Forgotten Chapter?
	Hannah	Straw	University of Warwick	Extra-Illustrating the Stuarts
	Cassie	Tanks	Northeastern University	Local Routes, Global Currents: Political Consciousness, Counter-Geographies, and the Spatial Formation of Liberalism in the Depression-Era West
	Silas	Udenze	University of Toronto	Archival Silences and Generational Memories of the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War: From Family Artifacts to Formal Archive
	Matthew	Ward	University of Birmingham	A New Scholarly Edition of the Works of Lord Byron for the Longman Annotated English Poets series (Volume VI)
	David	Whitesell	Independent Scholar	A Bibliographical Catalog of Pre-1901 American and Canadian Photographically Illustrated Books
	Amy	Wilcockson	Queen Mary University of London	The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley
	Tymek	Woodham	Queen Mary University of London	Countercultural Pedagogies: A Comparative Study of Beat and Black Mountain Teachings
	Xuhua (Sylvia)	Zhan	China Culture Connect (UK) and Asian American Art & Culture Initiative	Roots Unveiled: Early Chinese Migration Histories in Texas and the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands