In 2022, friends of the Ransom Center, along with Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, and Leonard Maltin, celebrated our 65th anniversary, establishing an endowment to fund the Robert De Niro Curator of Film position and advancing understanding of the humanities through the Center’s extraordinary film collection. [Read more…] about Celebrate with us in 2023
Articles
Photographer Laura Wilson delves into the lives of writers with stunning portraits
Off the Page
by LAURA WILSON
In late fall of 2008, I met John Updike and liked him—And thought then I’d like to do a portrait of him. But I dithered, and he died the following January before I had the chance. Earlier, I had seen some photographs taken by Dennis Stock of Updike in 1962 on the beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Updike, in street clothes, was at the edge of the waves, trying to get as close as possible without getting wet. The pictures were like stills from a home movie of a famous grown-up playing a children’s game by the sea.
Updike’s abrupt death prompted me to begin photographing writers in earnest. Over the course of 12 years, I was lucky enough to photograph some of the most influential writers of our time, women and men who will leave a lasting literary legacy.
A childhood gift inspires a lifelong passion for India and map-collecting
Charting a Path
Sixty maps and other prints of South Asia and the surrounding region have recently arrived at the Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin in honor of former professor Susan G. Hadden. Generously donated by her husband, James Hadden, Jr., the newly acquired Susan G. Hadden Collection of Early Maps of India contains maps dating from 1540 to around 1880, and together they track developments in cartography and the rise of European trade, colonization, and ultimately empire in the region.
The Hadden collection’s earliest map is a two-page woodcut that was printed as part of Sebastian Münster’s Geographia (Basel, 1540), a Latin version of Ptolemy’s widely printed and adapted Geography. It is the first printed map dedicated to illustrating the Asian continent as a whole. In it, only four cities within India have been identified, all on the western coast, all sites of early Portuguese settlement and/or trade.
[Read more…] about A childhood gift inspires a lifelong passion for India and map-collecting
“Dog” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
A Greek fragment is the first-known New Testament papyrus written on the front side of a scroll
by GEOFFREY S. SMITH
A Fragment Makes History
A few months ago, I received a much-anticipated email that read, “The courier is scheduled to deliver the Willoughby Papyrus to the Ransom Center tomorrow.” The next morning, I anxiously watched as members of the Center’s conservation staff carefully removed from the oversized shipping package a small black archival box, no more than 8 inches square. They slid off its sleeve, opened the protective cover, and placed the object on the table in front of me for inspection. Mounted between two plates of glass was an ancient papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John, no larger than a credit card.
The manuscript was fragmentary, and some of the Greek letters were not easy to make out, but it had not suffered any damage since I had last seen it in person, nearly seven years earlier. I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The “Willoughby Papyrus,” as it is known, had made it to The University of Texas safe and sound.
Center Wins Archival Excellence Award
The Ransom Center’s Radclyffe Hall and Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge Papers Project won the 2022 Archival Award for Excellence from the Texas Historical Records Advisory Board (THRAB) “for outstanding contributions to archives and historical records in the State of Texas.”
Through the project, thousands of records were digitized and published online for researchers. Hall and Troubridge are remembered as LGBTQ pioneers, and Hall’s 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, made lesbianism more visible in English society, despite the banning of the novel in England.
“The Hall-Troubridge project represents the type of multidisciplinary and technologically advanced archival effort that helps make primary sources more accessible and meaningful,” Texas State Archivist Jelain Chubb said.
More than 60,000 digitized items and a new educational resource based on the Hall-Troubridge papers were added to the Center’s online digital collections last year with support provided by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources. The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Created in 2016, the Archival Award of Excellence recognizes significant achievements in preserving and improving access to historical records in Texas. THRAB serves as an advisory body for historical records planning and supports efforts to preserve and provide access to archival collections throughout the state.
Funding for THRAB is provided by the National Historical Publications Records Commission, the grant-making arm of the National Archives and Records Administration. The state archivist is appointed by the governor to preside over the nine-member board.
The Texas State Library and Archives Commission provides Texans access to the information needed to be informed, productive citizens by preserving the archival record of Texas; enhancing the service capacity of public, academic and school libraries; assisting public agencies in the maintenance of their records; and meeting the reading needs of Texans with disabilities.