The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has granted the Harry Ransom Center a 2015 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives award to digitize more than 24,000 pages from the Gabriel García Márquez archive. [Read more…] about Award supports digitization of more than 24,000 images from the Gabriel García Márquez archive
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Ransom Center to host more than 80 scholars in fellowship program’s 25th year
The Ransom Center will support more than 80 research fellows for 2014–2015, the 25th anniversary of the fellowship program. Since the program’s inception, the Center has awarded fellowships to more than 900 scholars from around the world.
The fellowships support research projects in the humanities that require substantial on-site use of the Center’s collections of manuscripts, rare books, film, photography, art, and performing arts materials.
The 2014–2015 fellowship recipients, more than half of whom will be coming from abroad, will use Ransom Center materials to support projects with such titles as “J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Literary,” “Imagined Heartlands: Post-Postmodern Literature and the American Midwest,” “The Films of Powell and Pressburger,” “Norman Hall: Photo-Editing and International Connections in Mid-Twentieth Century Photography,” and “Dawn of a New Day: New York City Between the Fairs.”
The fellowships range from one to three months in duration and provide $3,000 of support per month. Travel stipends and dissertation fellowships are also awarded.
The stipends are funded by individual donors and organizations, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Creekmore and Adele Fath Charitable Foundation, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The University of Texas at Austin’s Office of Graduate Studies, Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, and program in British Studies.
The Ransom Center will host eight additional scholars in collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) International Placement Scheme (IPS). This program, funded and administered by the U.K.-based AHRC, offers early-career researchers and AHRC-funded doctoral students from U.K. universities the opportunity to enhance their research with a fellowship at one of its six participating host institutions.
Image: Cover of Eric Gill’s Twenty-five Nudes (1938; reprint, London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1951); James Salter’s notes on possible titles for his novel Light Years, ca. 1974–5; cover of Paul Hayden Duensing’s 25: a quarter-century of triumphs and disasters in the microcosm of the Private Press & Typefoundry of Paul Hayden Duensing (Kalamazoo, Mich.: The Private Press and Typefoundry of Paul Hayden Duensing, 1976); signaled message from the Royal Air Force to John Pudney requesting a poem for the organization’s 25th anniversary, March 24, 1943; photograph of 25th Street Theater, Waco, ca. 1962.
War photography exhibition showcases images from the Ransom Center’s photography collection
Back in November the exhibition WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath opened at its fourth and final venue, the Brooklyn Museum. This exhibition, which I curated with Anne Tucker and Will Michels in my former role in the photography department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, featured over 400 photographic objects dating from 1848 to 2012, including a number of photographs from the Harry Ransom Center’s collections. Our curatorial mission was neither to tell a history of war illustrated by photography nor to present a series on singular photographers. Instead, we hoped to bring together a selection of objects that highlighted the intersections between war and photography.
Photographs from the Ransom Center collections were included throughout the exhibition, enriching the thematic sections that explored daily routine, shell shock, and dissemination, as well as battlefield burial and death. The Gernsheim collection yielded a chilling 1871 print of communards in coffins, an image likely used to discourage further unrest in the streets of Paris, as well as Roger Fenton’s iconic and controversial 1855 photograph The Valley of the Shadow of Death from the Crimean War.
A Ransom Center fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment enabled curator Anne Tucker to spend weeks going through box after box of the Ransom Center’s prints, lantern slides, and stereographs. While in the reading room, she could compare the croppings of multiple photographs of Captain Ike Fenton and the U.S. Marines during the Korean War by David Douglas Duncan and share her findings. She also surveyed the collection of prints made at the height of the civil war in El Salvador by 30 international photographers, including Donna DeCesare and Harry Mattison.
The New York Journal- American photo morgue provided one of my favorite photographs in the exhibition. It is a small print from 1918 of a carrier pigeon being released from a tank on the Western Front. The image itself references one of the means of communication (pigeon transport) that is often associated with World War I, but it is also important as a photographic object because it carries the marks and highlights of an editor’s pencil, readying the print for reproduction and the image for dissemination.
Please click on the thumbnails below to view larger images.
