Ransom Center Magazine

archival research

NOT SPEED READING: The slow pleasures of research

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by JULIA PANKO
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. 

Lately, I have been dreaming of archives. I have never visited the Harry Ransom Center in person, but I recently perused its finding aids and made a checklist for a future trip. Noting the items from the Virginia Woolf Collection that I want to study, I was reminded of Woolf’s essay “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.” In it, Woolf wrote, “We like to feel . . . that other hands have been before us, smoothing the leather until the corners are rounded and blunt, turning the pages until they are yellow and dog’s-eared. We like to summon before us the ghosts of those old readers.”[1] I daydream about examining the Ransom Center’s collection of books from Woolf’s personal library, summoning her ghost as I survey the physical traces left by her reading. [Read more…] about NOT SPEED READING: The slow pleasures of research

ABOUT JULIA PANKO

Julia Panko is an Associate Professor of English at Weber State University, where she directs the Literature and Textual Studies program. She is the author of Out of Print: Mediating Information in the Novel and the Book (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020).

DARE TO RESEARCH: Diversity Awards for Research Engagement

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by JIM KUHN

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. 

The Harry Ransom Center’s collections are vast. Constantly growing with new acquisitions, our holdings include nearly 1 million books, more than 42 million manuscripts, 5 million photographs, and 100,000 works of art. When an item enters our collections, many activities need to happen before a researcher can encounter that material, before it is paged to the reading and viewing room, or before reference images can be provided as digital surrogates.  [Read more…] about DARE TO RESEARCH: Diversity Awards for Research Engagement

ABOUT JIM KUHN

Jim Kuhn is Associate Director for the Library Division and Hobby Foundation Librarian at the Ransom Center. He has master's degrees in philosophy and library science, is the co-author of Academic Freedom: A Guide to the Literature (Greenwood Press, 2000), and has written about special collections librarianship and digital humanities. Jim also volunteers with the campus Victims Advocate Network (VAN), and serves on the board of Texas After Violence Project, an Austin-based community archive and documentary project cultivating deeper understandings of the impacts of state-sanctioned violence on individuals, families, and communities.

Archival Fever offers a collaborative model for humanities research

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by AMY VIDOR and CAROLINE BARTA
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. 

Introducing a podcast: Welcome to Archival Fever![1] In each episode, your intrepid hosts take you into the archive in search of the wild, crazy, and bizarre … We’re becoming doctors in literature, Ph.D.s to be precise. That means we have research expertise in knowing how stories work and also about who gets to write them. It’s really about what stories mean for humanity and culture: telling you stories about what being human really means.

[Read more…] about Archival Fever offers a collaborative model for humanities research

ABOUT AMY VIDOR
Amy Vidor recently completed her Engaged Scholar Initiative postdoctoral fellowship with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her dissertation (2019), “Testifying to Auschwitz and Algeria,” analyzed writing by Germaine Tillion, Charlotte Delbo, and Marguerite Duras about the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and Algerian War.

ABOUT CAROLINE BARTA
Caroline Barta recently completed her dissertation, “Julia’s Cookbook Readers: 1948-1963,” which discovers and celebrates the cookbook readers behind Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) by Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle. Her work was supported by a dissertation fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center in 2019.

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