Harry Ransom Center to Host More Than 80 Scholars in Fellowship Program’s 25th Year

Cover of Eric Gill’s “Twenty-five Nudes” (1938; reprint, London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1951); James Salter’s notes on possible titles for his novel “Light Years,” ca. 19745; cover of Paul Hayden Duensing’s “25: a quarter-century of triumphs and disasters in the microcosm of the Private Press and Typefoundry of Paul Hayden Duensing” (Kalamazoo, Mich.: The Private Press and Typefoundry of Paul Hayden Duensing, 1976); signaled message from the Royal Air Force to John Pudney requesting a poem for the organization’s 25th anniversary, March 24, 1943; photograph of 25th Street Theater, Waco, ca. 1962. 

AUSTIN, Texas — The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, will support more than 80 research fellows for 2014–2015, the 25th anniversary of the fellowship program.

Since the program’s inception, the Center has awarded fellowships to more than 900 scholars from around the world.

The fellowships support research projects in the humanities that require substantial on-site use of the Center’s collections of manuscripts, rare books, film, photography, art and performing arts materials.

The 20142015 fellowship recipients, more than half of whom will be coming from abroad, will use Ransom Center materials to support projects with such titles as “J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Literary,” “Imagined Heartlands: Post-Postmodern Literature and the American Midwest,” “The Films of Powell and Pressburger,” “Norman Hall: Photo-Editing and International Connections in Mid-Twentieth Century Photography” and “Dawn of a New Day: New York City Between the Fairs.”

The fellowships range from one to three months in duration and provide $3,000 of support per month. Travel stipends and dissertation fellowships are also awarded.

The stipends are funded by individual donors and organizations, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Creekmore and Adele Fath Charitable Foundation, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and The University of Texas at Austin’s Office of Graduate Studies, Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies and program in British Studies.

The Ransom Center will host eight additional scholars in collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) International Placement Scheme (IPS). This program, funded and administered by the U.K.-based AHRC, offers early-career researchers and AHRC-funded doctoral students from U.K. universities the opportunity to enhance their research with a fellowship at one of its six participating host institutions.