Dr. Jana Funke, Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, U.K., visited the Ransom Center on a Hobby Family Foundation Fellowship in July and August 2010 to work on Radclyffe Hall’s short fiction. She is using the material she gathered for a monograph exploring the relationship between modernist sexualities… read more
Articles
Harry Houdini slideshow celebrates 137th birthday
The Harry Ransom Center owns a collection of materials related to magician Harry Houdini, whose 137th birthday is today. This slideshow highlights some examples of materials in the collection. Parts of the Houdini (1874-1926) collection pertain to the numerous magicians with whom Houdini cultivated personal relationships, but the focus of… read more
Elizabeth Taylor connections to Ransom Center holdings
Actress Elizabeth Taylor, who died today at the age of 79, has connections to the Ransom Center holdings, ranging from the Mel Gussow collection to the Ernest Lehman collection. The former New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow, who died in 2005, wrote Elizabeth Taylor’s obituary. His obituary, with updated… read more
In the galleries: Russell Banks adapts to a word processor
Today it seems, with iPads and hybrid cars and 3-D blockbusters, technology advancements are, quite literally, right in our faces. Almost jaded by the constant onslaught, we expect constant development and easily adapt, rarely finding ourselves bewildered by new devices. This, however, was not always so. American author Russell Banks’s… read more
In the galleries: The productive, but complicated, relationship between Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan
Among the material in the Ransom Center’s current exhibition, Becoming Tennessee Williams, is a picture of Tennessee Williams holding a photograph of Elia Kazan. Kazan was an American film and theater director, producer, screenwriter, and co-founder of the influential Actors Studio. In his theatrical career, Kazan became one of the… read more
In the galleries: Stella Adler’s notes on Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Glass Menagerie’
Stella Adler was considered one of this country’s most important teachers of the principles of acting, character analysis, and script analysis. Adler began acting when she was just four years old, alongside her parents, Jacob and Sara Adler, in a production of the Yiddish play Broken Hearts by Z. Libin.… read more