![W. & D. Downey (British, active 1855–1940), [Mary Cornwallis West], ca. 1880. Albumen print with applied color (cabinet card), 6 ½ x 4 ¼ in. Gernsheim collection, 964:0488: 0002, f TR 655.11 C525 HRC-P](https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/files/2016/05/Web_Mrs.-Cornwallis-West-in-hand-colored-purple-dress-in-hammock.jpg)
Before Lillie Langtry (née Emilie Charlotte Le Breton, 1853–1929) became a stage actress, she was known as one of London’s “professional beauties.” [Read more…] about Fellows Find: Smile (or pout!): Photographs of London’s professional primpers
Fellows Find
Fellows Find: Hear inside Stella Adler’s studio
Scott Balcerzak is Associate Professor of film and literature at Northern Illinois University. He was supported by the Dorot Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Jewish Studies and is currently writing a book on Stella Adler and male movie stars. [Read more…] about Fellows Find: Hear inside Stella Adler’s studio
Book Balls, fox-trots, and boeuf bordelaise: The early history of international P.E.N.
In the course of researching how South Asian writers circulated in literary London between the World Wars, I spent some time immersed in the Harry Ransom Center’s expansive P.E.N. archive. [Read more…] about Book Balls, fox-trots, and boeuf bordelaise: The early history of international P.E.N.
Fellows Find: Infinite Jest at 20
Dan Sinykin, a visiting assistant professor at Grinnell College, visited the Ransom Center during the summer of 2014 to research his dissertation After the Boom: Apocalypse and Economics in American Literature of the Neoliberal Period. Sinykin was the recipient of a dissertation fellowship.
On February 23, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest turns 20. The novel was an instant hit and made Wallace a literary superstar—a winning reception that began with an innovative hype campaign on the part of the publisher, Little, Brown, which sent a series of postcards to thousands of reviewers and booksellers promising, among other things, “infinite pleasure.”
Fellows Find: Researcher traces the compositional structures of David Foster Wallace’s Fiction
David Hering, a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool, visited the Ransom Center during the summer of 2013 to research his forthcoming book on David Foster Wallace. His research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment.
Fellows Find: Revelations hidden on post-its, in book flaps, and in the margins of the papers in David Foster Wallace’s archive
Stephen J. Burn, a Reader in American Literature after 1945 at the University of Glasgow, visited the Ransom Center during the spring of 2011 to research his book-in-progress, Neurofiction: the Contemporary American Novel and the Brain (Don DeLillo/ David Foster Wallace). Burn’s research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment.
When I first visited the Harry Ransom Center in August of 2008, I wasn’t looking for David Foster Wallace. I’d just finished revising a book that read Wallace alongside his contemporaries Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers (Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism), and was putting together a blueprint for a new book that I planned to build out of the Center’s archive of Don DeLillo’s assorted drafts and research materials. [Read more…] about Fellows Find: Revelations hidden on post-its, in book flaps, and in the margins of the papers in David Foster Wallace’s archive