Ransom Center Magazine

What is Research?

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.

The passion to push the paradigm

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by DANIEL ARBINO
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. 

As a librarian at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas at Austin, I have been fortunate to carry values from my personal research journey and apply them to collection development and instruction. On a daily basis, I engage with researchers—faculty, students, scholars, and artists from Latin America and across the globe—whose own research journeys may begin years before they step through our door. [Read more…] about The passion to push the paradigm

DANIEL ARBINO
Daniel Arbino is the head of collection development at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas at Austin. He has published extensively in Caribbean and U.S. Latinx literature with an emphasis on post-colonial theory and critical race theory. His most recent publication is “When the Mirror Says Yes to Dark Beauty: Healing the Colonial Wound" in Inés Hernández-Ávila's "That's Tejana," Chiricú Journal (Fall 2019).

75 YEARS HENCE: Arthur Miller adapts Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for radio

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by JANINE BARCHAS
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. 

On the 18th of November in 1945, Arthur Miller’s radio adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice could be heard nationwide as part of a special Thanksgiving program. Listeners in New York heard it at 10 p.m. on ABC station WJZ. The show made the list of “Today’s Leading Events” in The New York Times and was the Theater Guild’s most highly rated program that quarter, capturing a 19.4 percent share of the national radio audience. The original recording is worth a listen not only as a TARDIS to 1945 but as the most unlikely comic mashup of two great writers: [Read more…] about 75 YEARS HENCE: Arthur Miller adapts Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for radio

JANINE BARCHAS
Janine Barchas is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Lost Books of Jane Austen, which led to an exhibition entitled “Austen in Austin” at the Ransom Center in the fall of 2019. She has also contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Lit Hub.

Carmen is everywhere: opera, diaspora, and interdisciplinary inquiry

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by JENNIFER M. WILKS
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. 

My latest fascination with Carmen began 14 years ago, when I was spending a semester in Paris on a faculty exchange. The night before leaving for spring break, I went to see Mark Dornford-May’s 2005 film U-Carmen eKhayelitsha at L’Arlequin, a grand cinema on the rue de Rennes. While in college I had seen both Otto Preminger’s 1954 Hollywood classic Carmen Jones and a Washington National Opera production of Carmen, and I was curious about how the story would translate to a contemporary African context. [Read more…] about Carmen is everywhere: opera, diaspora, and interdisciplinary inquiry

ABOUT JENNIFER M. WILKS

Jennifer M. Wilks is an associate professor of English, African and African Diaspora Studies, and comparative literature at The University of Texas at Austin, where she directs the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies. Her cultural history of Carmen adaptations set in African diasporic contexts is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Hands-on research designed to preserve the Center’s collections

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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. 

Our work in the Harry Ransom Center’s Preservation and Conservation Division focuses on caring for the Center’s vast and varied collections. Much like the interdisciplinary nature of today’s engineering and medical professions, science, technology, and craft underpin the work of the division’s conservators and preservation technicians. While our work as preservation technicians focuses heavily on preventive actions such as integrated pest management and monitoring the storage and exhibition environments, we also design and construct protective enclosures to safeguard collection objects, photographs, books, audiovisual recordings, works on paper, and more. [Read more…] about Hands-on research designed to preserve the Center’s collections

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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