Ransom Center Magazine

Research + Teaching

Making the Banned Accessible: Digitizing the Hall-Troubridge Archive 

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by VEGA SHAH

The Ransom Center is home to the collection and papers of British author Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) and her partner, Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge (1887-1963), a sculptor and translator. The couple, being openly lesbian partners, are remembered as LGBTQ pioneers, with Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), making lesbianism more visible in English society, despite the banning of the novel in England.

The Hall-Troubridge papers have been digitized and are accessible online in a new digital collection. Explore more than 40,000 images of Hall and Troubridge’s papers, letters, and photos, that provide insight into their personal correspondence, as well as topics such as gender, politics, and spirituality.

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ABOUT VEGA SHAH

Vega Shah is an undergraduate intern at the Harry Ransom Center and a senior at the University of Texas at Austin pursuing a B.A in Anthropology, a minor in Art History, and certificates in Liberal Arts Honors and Museum Studies. Her research interests include Islamic and contemporary art and equity in museum education and curation.

Choreographer Deborah Hay’s archive goes to the Harry Ransom Center

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Award-winning choreographer Deborah Hay has established her archive at the Harry Ransom Center, a major destination for the study of dance and performance at The University of Texas at Austin. A founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, Hay is recognized as a pivotal figure in the development of post-modern dance. [Read more…] about Choreographer Deborah Hay’s archive goes to the Harry Ransom Center

The slow research of collection development

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This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation. 

Shortly before the end of 2020, the papers of National Book Award–winning author Lily Tuck arrived at the Harry Ransom Center. It is always exciting when a new archive enters our building, but this arrival from New York City, in the midst of a devastating pandemic, felt especially significant. The collection’s delivery was originally scheduled for March of 2020 but was promptly put on hold as we began to learn of a dangerous, new, and rapidly spreading virus and as institutions shut down around the world. Until measures could be put into place to ensure the safety of everyone involved, the delivery of Lily Tuck’s correspondence, her research notes, manuscripts of such novels as The News from Paraguay and The Double Life of Liliane, and other material documenting her writing life had to be delayed. [Read more…] about The slow research of collection development

THRESHOLD ECOLOGIES: On Earth (and on Earth Day)

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A day turns into a week into a month, and more. Over the past year, our sense of time has extended into ongoing uncertainty from a global pandemic. For those grounded close to home, if we are lucky, our environments have become circumscribed by thresholds and windows, actual and virtual, sensing global interconnections in the very fragile air that we breathe. Others have been unable to breathe. Challenges this past year, including systemic racial inequities, grow out of long histories. Living in the present, what we call past once had alternative futures, even as our linear narratives timestamp 2020 into 2021.

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What is research but a conversation in search of the truth?

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by IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE
This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation. 

Biography is a long, slow process of careful research … Reading diaries and letters and sifting through artifacts … I found the answers to these questions by carefully examining each document and artifact, and slowly I was able to write her story … As a biographer, going to an archive is how you find the person you are writing about.
—IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE

[Read more…] about What is research but a conversation in search of the truth?

ABOUT IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE
Iris Jamahl Dunkle writes and lives in Northern California and is the author of Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and her latest collection of poetry is West : Fire : Archive (Center for Literary Publishing, 2021). Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.

ETCHED ARCHIVE: Windows at the Harry Ransom Center

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by ANNE TERRILL
This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation. 

Buildings tell stories. When Victorian-era critic John Ruskin looked at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, he saw a building that reminded him of an illuminated book, intended to be legible to a visitor. The façade created a space that could start doing the work of the church before the visitor even went inside; as he wrote, “both externally and internally, the architectural construction became partly merged in pictorial effect” as “a vast illuminated missal.”[1] The colors, materials, images, and ornamentation are not just objects of analysis or delight but incorporate a viewer as a participant in the building’s project and environment. [Read more…] about ETCHED ARCHIVE: Windows at the Harry Ransom Center

ABOUT ANNE TERRILL

Anne Terrill is a Visitor Services Assistant at the Harry Ransom Center. Prior to joining the Ransom Center, she worked as a guide at Glenstone, a contemporary art museum in Potomac, Maryland. She is currently working on a project to broaden access to information about the Center's windows.

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