Ransom Center Magazine

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Fellowships Awarded to 52 Scholars

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The Ransom Center has awarded 52 fellowships for the upcoming year to postdoctoral, dissertation and independent researchers studying a wide array of topics, from Tennessee Williams’ visual self portraits to 1980s Hollywood Gothic, Deborah Hay and the choreographer as archivist, literary estates and copyright, the Nigerian Civil War and Nigerian contemporary art, and more.

Since 1990, the Ransom Center Fellowship Program has supported more than 1,250 research projects requiring extensive onsite use of the Ransom Center’s collections and resulting in the publication of books, journal articles and doctoral theses. Fellowships are awarded for projects that span the Center’s collections in literature, performing arts, film, photography, and art.
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Winners Announced for 2023 Schuchard Prize

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The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin has awarded the second-annual Ronald Schuchard Undergraduate Archival Research Prize to three outstanding researchers. The competition awards cash prizes to the top undergraduate research papers or digital projects created using primary source material from the Center’s archival collections.

On Wednesday, April 26, the 2023 Schuchard Prize winners were honored at a reception at the Harry Ransom Center.

“Some of you know that this is personally very meaningful to me,” Director Stephen Enniss said. “It was established by a mentor of mine, Professor Ron Schuchard…he’s the distinguished professor at Emory University, where I worked with him for 16 years, but a UT alum. Really, his own use of archives has transformed his professional career. His most recent publication was The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot, a massive multi-volume set that’s a real work of scholarship and accomplishment, and his hope in establishing this prize was that the way that primary source research informed his own professional life, that it might also inform a new generation of students and scholars in their lives.”

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The Knickerbocker Theatre Collapse

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by HANNAH NEUHAUSER

In the 1980s, the Harry Ransom Center received a scrapbook from John and Vera Hills along with an extraordinary unpublished account of their survival of the Knickerbocker Theatre roof collapse in Washington, D.C. on January 28, 1922. The scrapbook and testimony are available for research in the Ransom Center’s Reading and Viewing Room. Graduate assistant Hannah Neuhauser offers these insights on the material.

We started out for an hour’s walk that was to last seven months and almost an eternity…
—FROM JOHN HILLS’S TESTIMONY

Vera Kreger Hills did not wish to go out on the evening of January 28, 1922. It was cold, brutally cold, and a whirring blizzard encased Washington D.C in over two feet of snow.

The weather did not deter her husband, Captain John Huntington Hills, however. He thought it “would be fun to take a stroll through the heavy snow.” After a few blocks, they passed by the Knickerbocker Theatre on 18th Street and Columbia Road. That night the theater was featuring a silent comedy, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, that heralded good reviews.

Vera Kreger Hills preferred to finish their walk rather than go to the theatre, but consented to her husband’s idea. They had not been in the theatre for over a year. They bought their tickets for 25 cents and took their familiar seats under the balcony in the second row. Unbeknownst to the couple at the time, their seating arrangement would save their lives.

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ABOUT HANNAH NEUHAUSER

Hannah Neuhauser is a PhD musicology student at the Butler School of Music at The University of Texas at Austin. She is a Pathways Fellow serving as a Curatorial Assistant at the Harry Ransom Center in the 2022-2023 term.

On the Record: Black Creators and the Jazz Age

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Exhibition organized by Harry Ransom Center graduate research assistants sheds light on black creators from the collections whose work exemplifies the spirit and history of jazz.

The music of saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, photographs of jazz and swing singer Billie Holiday and saxophonist Dexter Gordon, a jazz-inspired essay by Langston Hughes, and a novel by writer Claude McKay are some of the works spotlighted in a display organized for Black History Month 2023.

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