Research Fellowships at the Harry Ransom Center
Applications are now open for the 2025-2026 research fellowship program at the Harry Ransom Center. We anticipate awarding up to 60 postdoctoral, doctoral, creative, and independent scholar fellowships in the upcoming cycle for projects which would benefit from research with the extensive collections held at the Ransom Center. Fellowships provide travel and research stipends ranging from one week to two months. The deadline to apply is November 4, 2024 at 5pm CST.
For more information on our fellowship program and to apply, visit: https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/fellowships/
About the Performing Arts Collections
The Ransom Center’s performing arts collections document a wide variety of performance genres, particularly from the United Kingdom and America. The collections feature holdings in theatre, dance, music, musical theatre, opera, and popular entertainments, such as the circus, vaudeville, pantomime, minstrel shows, puppetry, and magic. From drafts and promptbooks to designs and box office receipts, the materials in the collection emphasize the creative process from concept and staging to publication and revival.
The Center holds one of the largest collections of American, British, and Irish playwright archives including the papers of David Hare, Lillian Hellman, Adrienne Kennedy, Terrence McNally, Arthur Miller, John Osborne, J. B. Priestley, Elmer Rice, Tom Stoppard, and Tennessee Williams, along with significant collections of writers like Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, Sam Shepard, and Oscar Wilde. Visitors to the Reading and Viewing Room can access over 1,100 audio and video recordings of Stella Adler’s master classes on acting and script interpretation, John Wilkes Booth’s promptbook for Richard III, Harry Houdini‘s love letters to his wife Bess, and epic scene designs by artists like Boris Aronson, Norman Bel Geddes, Gordon Conway, and Eldon Elder.
You can explore hundreds of thousands of original manuscripts, letters, photographs, designs, playbills, books, costumes, and recordings through the Ransom Center’s finding aids, databases, digital collections, and research guides.
Recent Additions and Finding Aids
The collections are growing constantly, and new collections are added to various topical research guides as they arrive. Recent collections include:
– The personal papers of legendary singer and actress Ethel Waters including correspondence, scripts, sheet music, tour itineraries, critical reviews and notebooks, drafts of her memoir, extensive financial records, publicity, photographs, books, art, personal effects, and nearly 200 LP recordings of commercial and non-commercial recordings.
– The papers of playwright and director Emily Mannincluding drafts, research material, rehearsal drafts, business files, reviews, publicity materials, correspondence, artistic office files, production binders, and records from her time as resident playwright and artistic director of the McCarter Theatre at Princeton.
– The papers of British American theatre director Les Waters including scripts, reviews, programs, correspondence, and other related production material. Waters was associate artistic director at Berkeley Rep from 2003-2011 and artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville from 2012-2018. He has directed premieres of numerous playwrights including Caryl Churchill, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Will Eno, Lucas Hnath, Naomi Iizuka, Chuck Mee, Sarah Ruhl, Anne Washburn and many others.
– The Girvice Archer Jr. Opera Collection includes over 100 boxes of American, British, and continental European opera history. It is especially strong in 19th and 20th-century performers, and includes modern photographs, cabinet cards, glass plate negatives, scrapbooks, libretti, prints, posters, correspondence, and artwork.
– The Ransom Center’s Theatre 2020 Collection was a two-year initiative to gather digital records reflecting the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic on the performing arts profession. Over 339 GB of digital files are preserved and now accessible in the Ransom Center’s reading room, including recordings of virtual performances, press releases, emails, script drafts, journals, policy documents, social media posts, and more.
Performing arts collections which have been cataloged or recently re-cataloged with additions include the papers of Merle Armitage, E. P. Conkle, William Goyen, Marc Edmund Jones, Arthur Miller, Frances Starr, Arnold Wesker, and Bonita Granville Wrather.
Contacts
Prospective researchers are always encouraged to contact the Ransom Center about their projects ahead of research visits.
– Questions about Performing Arts collections: performingarts@hrc.utexas.edu
– Questions about other collections, to request scans, or to plan non-fellowship research visits: reference@hrc.utexas.edu
– Questions about the fellowship program: ransomfellowships@utexas.edu