Ransom Center Magazine

Research

Fellowships Awarded to 52 Scholars

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The Ransom Center has awarded 52 fellowships for the upcoming year to postdoctoral, dissertation and independent researchers studying a wide array of topics, from Tennessee Williams’ visual self portraits to 1980s Hollywood Gothic, Deborah Hay and the choreographer as archivist, literary estates and copyright, the Nigerian Civil War and Nigerian contemporary art, and more.

Since 1990, the Ransom Center Fellowship Program has supported more than 1,250 research projects requiring extensive onsite use of the Ransom Center’s collections and resulting in the publication of books, journal articles and doctoral theses. Fellowships are awarded for projects that span the Center’s collections in literature, performing arts, film, photography, and art.
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On the Record: Black Creators and the Jazz Age

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Exhibition organized by Harry Ransom Center graduate research assistants sheds light on black creators from the collections whose work exemplifies the spirit and history of jazz.

The music of saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, photographs of jazz and swing singer Billie Holiday and saxophonist Dexter Gordon, a jazz-inspired essay by Langston Hughes, and a novel by writer Claude McKay are some of the works spotlighted in a display organized for Black History Month 2023.

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A Greek fragment is the first-known New Testament papyrus written on the front side of a scroll

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by GEOFFREY S. SMITH

A Fragment Makes History

A few months ago, I received a much-anticipated email that read, “The courier is scheduled to deliver the Willoughby Papyrus to the Ransom Center tomorrow.” The next morning, I anxiously watched as members of the Center’s conservation staff carefully removed from the oversized shipping package a small black archival box, no more than 8 inches square. They slid off its sleeve, opened the protective cover, and placed the object on the table in front of me for inspection. Mounted between two plates of glass was an ancient papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John, no larger than a credit card.

The manuscript was fragmentary, and some of the Greek letters were not easy to make out, but it had not suffered any damage since I had last seen it in person, nearly seven years earlier. I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The “Willoughby Papyrus,” as it is known, had made it to The University of Texas safe and sound.

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ABOUT GEOFFREY S. SMITH

Geoffrey S. Smith is Associate Professor, Fellow of the Louise Farmer Boyer Chair in Biblical Studies, and Director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins (ISAC) in the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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