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
Research + Teaching
The slow research of collection development
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)
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?
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
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ETCHED ARCHIVE: Windows at the Harry Ransom Center
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
Teaching research online during a pandemic
by ANDI GUSTAVSON
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.
Since the start of the pandemic, the Instructional team of the Harry Ransom Center has met every two weeks to figure out how to alter our teaching for virtual instruction. With each new class, our educators have quickly adopted a new tool or shifted our lesson plan, assessed what worked and didn’t, and then tried again. Like everyone else, we began to experience Zoom fatigue, so dispensed with long, slow discussions in favor of 10-minute interactive segments. These changes reflect the logistical necessities of teaching online in a pandemic. Yet the forced shift within our Instructional program has helped us refine our teaching and taught us a few things in the process. [Read more…] about Teaching research online during a pandemic