• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Ransom Center Magazine

  • Articles
  • Sections
    • Art
    • Books + Manuscripts
    • Conservation
    • Exhibitions + Events
    • Film
    • Literature
    • Photography
    • Research + Teaching
    • Theatre + Performing Arts
  • Print Edition

fellows

Fellowships awarded to UT-Austin faculty and graduate students

March 29, 2021 - Harry Ransom Center

The Harry Ransom Center has awarded over a dozen fellowships for 2021-2022 to The University of Texas at Austin faculty and graduate students through the Center’s new UT-Austin Fellowship program. The new fellows reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the Center’s collections and represent a wide range of departments, programs, and schools across the university. [Read more…] about Fellowships awarded to UT-Austin faculty and graduate students

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts, Featured1, Film, Photography, Research + Teaching, Theatre + Performing Arts Tagged With: 2021-2022 Fellows, archive, fellows, Fellowships, literature, Religion

Slowly, and then round again

March 18, 2021 - Harry Ransom Center

by SIMON LOXLEY
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. 

During my time as a researcher, I have always been a working graphic designer. I suspect that, as a consequence, my underlying mindset has always been very results-driven. As a designer, if you want to get paid, all the ends have to be tied up, all ideas followed to a conclusion. Therefore, sitting at a desk in a library, I still feel that I have to produce something that can be shown to the world, whether this be in book form, an article, or other verbal or visual presentation. Although I always really enjoy the process of research, rightly or wrongly, a product is always at the back of my mind. Investigation, then communication. [Read more…] about Slowly, and then round again

Filed Under: Featured1, Research + Teaching Tagged With: archive, fellow, fellows, What is Research?

ABOUT SIMON LOXLEY
Simon Loxley is the author of Type: the secret history of letters (2004), Printer’s Devil: the life and work of Frederic Warde (2013),Type is Beautiful: the story of fifty remarkable fonts (2016), and Emery Walker: arts, crafts and a world in motion (2019). He is a graphic designer, teacher, and writer in the UK, where he serves as designer and editor of Ultrabold, the journal of St. Bride Library.

SARA COLERIDGE: A life unfolding

March 11, 2021 - Harry Ransom Center

by JEFFREY W. BARBEAU
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. 

Sometimes the scrawled letters on a page slow reading to a halt. Unlike printed words in a bound volume or transcripts that risk sanitizing history, handwriting produces an entirely different reading experience. Words unfold, as they were written originally, and events take on new meaning in the materiality of the archives. The manuscript of a letter or diary may be neat and legible when composed in tranquility, or scribbled hastily in times of anger or mourning. In print, the end of Sara Coleridge’s life was hardly a mystery, but reading her manuscripts changed everything for me.

[Read more…] about SARA COLERIDGE: A life unfolding

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts, Featured1, Research + Teaching Tagged With: archive, fellows, What is Research?

ABOUT JEFFREY W. BARBEAU
Jeffrey W. Barbeau is professor of theology at Wheaton College. The author and editor of several books, he has published widely on religion and literature, including an intellectual biography of the poet, Sara Coleridge: Her Life and Thought (Palgrave, 2014). He received a Pforzheimer Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center in 2007–2008.

Researching microbiography in Tennessee Williams’s artwork

March 4, 2021 - Harry Ransom Center

by JOHN S. BAK
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. 

Research helps solve mysteries we didn’t even know existed.

While most scholars search for answers in an archive, others like me seek out questions. For us, discovering a mystery is as fun as solving one. Visually speaking, the first experience resembles an exclamation point, a quick and straight cut through the files to where the spot marks the x, like many an algebra equation, begs a solution; the second is a gentler promenade along the sinewy curves of the question mark, where the final point opens an inquiry more than it closes a claim. As Theodore Adorno writes of both marks, “An exclamation point looks like an index finger raised in warning; a question mark looks like a flashing light or the blink of an eye.”[1] Habitués of the Harry Ransom Center would do well to discern which punctuation mark they best resemble. [Read more…] about Researching microbiography in Tennessee Williams’s artwork

Filed Under: Authors, Featured1, Research + Teaching Tagged With: archive, fellows, What is Research?

ABOUT JOHN S. BAK

John S. Bak, Professeur at the Université de Lorraine in France, holds degrees from the universities of Illinois, Ball State and the Sorbonne. A Fulbrighter to the Czech Republic in 1995, he has been Visiting Fellow at Harvard (2011), Columbia (2013), the Harry Ransom Center (2014), and Oxford (2014-16). His books include Tennessee Williams and Europe (2014), Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life (2013), New Selected Essays: Where I Live (2009), and Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Queer Masculinities (2009).

Jean Malaquais and the life of a novel

February 8, 2021 - Harry Ransom Center

by JULIA ELSKY
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.

Researching the life of a novel means uncovering the traces of how it was written—not only the edits, corrections, and additions made to a manuscript, but also the conversations in letters or in diaries that show how these decisions were made. Finding and bringing together these traces reveal what cannot be known when reading the published novel alone. By teasing out these connections, the researcher can be in dialogue with the novel itself in new ways. [Read more…] about Jean Malaquais and the life of a novel

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts, Featured1, Research + Teaching Tagged With: archive, fellows, Jean Malaquais, What is Research?

ABOUT JULIA ELSKY

Julia Elsky is Assistant Professor of French at Loyola University Chicago. A chapter of her book, Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France (Stanford University Press, 2020), focuses on Jean Malaquais and is based on her research at the Harry Ransom Center.

The women who made Selznick’s screenplays

February 5, 2021 - Harry Ransom Center

by ERIN MCGUIRL
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.

Research is part of the history of Hollywood’s Golden age. Eighty years ago, in the heyday of the studio system, little libraries on studio lots employed a handful of people who collaborated with writers, directors, producers, and designers to dig up the details that made the movies look and sound authentic. Studio researchers made sure that audiences were focused on the story, not the modern look of a movie set in the nineteenth century. [Read more…] about The women who made Selznick’s screenplays

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts, Featured1, Film, Research + Teaching Tagged With: David O. Selznick archive, fellows, What is Research?

ABOUT ERIN MCGUIRL

Erin McGuirl is the Executive Director of the Bibliographical Society of America. Her background is in librarianship, and since 2008 she has worked with library and private collections of rare materials in New York City and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared in Printing History, Atlas Obscura, the blog for the Journal of the History of Ideas, and in the forthcoming Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton University Press).

Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4_kazYMjNM

Recent Posts

  • Celebrate with us in 2023
  • Photographer Laura Wilson delves into the lives of writers with stunning portraits
  • A childhood gift inspires a lifelong passion for India and map-collecting
  • “Dog” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • A Greek fragment is the first-known New Testament papyrus written on the front side of a scroll

Tags

acquisition Alice's Adventures in Wonderland archive archives Art Books Cataloging Conservation Council on Library and Information Resources David Foster Wallace David O. Selznick digitization exhibition Exhibitions Fellows Find Fellowships Film Frank Reaugh Frank Reaugh: Landscapes of Texas and the American West Gabriel Garcia Marquez Gabriel Garcia Marquez archive Gone with the Wind I have seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America Lewis Carroll literature Magnum Photos Manuscripts Meet the Staff Nobel Prize Norman Bel Geddes Norman Mailer Performing Arts Photography poetry preservation Publishing Research Robert De Niro Shakespeare theater The King James Bible: Its History and Influence The Making of Gone With The Wind Undergraduate What is Research? World War I

Archives

Before Footer

Sign up for eNews

Our monthly newsletter highlights news, exhibitions, and programs.

Connect With Us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

About

Ransom Center Magazine is an online and print publication sharing stories and news about the Harry Ransom Center, its collections, and the creative community surrounding it.

Copyright © 2023 Harry Ransom Center

Web Accessibility · Web Privacy