Texas Archives and Resources

Consider extending your conference trip to visit one or more of the Texas libraries and archives around the state. Below is a short list of those Texas institutions that not only have deep collections relevant to the study of Romanticism and Justice, but also offer funding opportunities, travel grants and fellowships, for researchers.

University of Texas at Austin

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is renowned for its extensive collection of literary manuscripts and archives, and has significant archives of Romantic-era materials.

For its 2023–24 program, the Ransom Center will award 10 dissertation fellowships and up to 60 postdoctoral fellowships. Applications are now open.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 14, 2022, 5 P.M. CST (UTC -6)

Baylor University, Waco

The Armstrong Browning Library (ABL) at Baylor University has a vast and invaluable 19th-century collection:

The ABL holds an unparalleled collection of manuscripts, letters, and rare items connected to the life and work of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet its holdings extend far beyond the Brownings, containing over fifty-thousand manuscripts, books, letters, periodicals, tracts, pamphlets, and other cultural artifacts related to nineteenth-century literature (especially poetry), music, visual culture, politics, religion, and science. Especially strong are holdings for figures such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Anna Brownell Jameson, George MacDonald, the Rossetti siblings, John Henry Newman, Francis William Newman, Charles Dickens, William Ewart Gladstone, and Queen Victoria—to name only a very few. The ABL boasts one of the best collections of letters, journals, and rare printed materials by Joseph Milsand, the nineteenth-century French literary critic, philosopher, theologian, and friend of Robert Browning. Romanticists will find letters, rare books, first editions, and manuscripts linked to authors such as William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, William Blake, Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott, among others.  The ABL has amassed one of the world’s leading collections of volumes by nineteenth-century women poets, which includes a valuable representation of lesser-known poets alongside those, such as Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who have attracted sustained scholarly attention. These holdings are complemented by a large collection of lesser-known volumes of Victorian poetry. A noteworthy portion of the collections is devoted to manuscripts and rare items related to well-known American authors such as James Russell Lowell, Henry Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.).  Those interested in religious history will find especially useful the ABL’s collection of thousands of nineteenth-century religious tracts and pamphlets.  These items and names represent only a fraction of the nineteenth-century subjects and figures, well-known and lesser-known, represented at the ABL.

Find information on the grants and fellowships the ABL has offered in the past, and watch for announcements of future grant cycles here.

CHECK THEIR WEBSITE FOR ANNOUNCEMENTS OF THEIR 2023 GRANT PROGRAMS

University of Houston

Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (“Recovery”) at the University of Houston is both an international program to locate, preserve and disseminate Hispanic culture of the United States in its written form since colonial times until 1980, and home to an extensive archive of manuscripts, art, microfilm, photos, and ephemera. They offer Grants-in-Aid, funded by funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Information on this grant program can be found here.

CHECK THEIR WEBSITE FOR ANNOUNCEMENTS OF THEIR GRANT PROGRAM

University of Texas at San Antonio

The UTSA Libraries Special Collections houses the Sons of the Republic of Texas Kathryn Stoner O’connor Mexican Manuscript Collection, with significant holdings from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Other special collections of potential interest are: The Israel Worsham Family Papers (a Texas slave-owning family); John M. Steinfeldt Papers (a San Antonio Musician and family); and, the Sebron Sneed Wilcox papers (The Laredo Historical Society). Note: the UTSA does not offer a grant program for visiting researchers at this time.

Rice University, Houston

The Woodson Research Center at Rice University holds, among other collections, extensive resources related to the history of slavery and racial injustice stretching back to the 18th Century. They offer a Reginald Moore Travel Grant for Research in Activism and Social Justice.

Holding highlights include:

Blake Replica prints

The Julian Huxley Papers

The Robert L. Patten: George Cruikshank research materials

THE CALL FOR APPLICATIONS WILL BE POSTED IN JANUARY 2023 FOR THE 2023 CALENDAR YEAR.

Texas A&M University, College Station

Texas A&M University Libraries/Cushing Memorial Library and Archives and the College of Arts & Sciences proudly support the Don Kelly Research Collection Fellowship, which covers all aspects of LGBTQIA+ Studies, from history through the visual arts. The fellowship is for a period of 2 weeks to 2 months for work that is based on resources within the Don Kelly Research Collection of Gay Literature and Culture housed in the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives. Research topics can include, but are not limited to, the following areas, relative to the LGBTQIA+ communities: pulp fiction, literature, film, protest movements, culture, art, popular literature, serials, international, Andy Warhol, Beat Poets, artist books, race, and gender. More information can be found here.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: JANUARY 6, 2023

University of North Texas, Denton

The Vann Victorian Collection is a treasure of the University of North Texas Libraries and an exceptional resource for the study of Victorian literature. UNT Libraries invite applications for the UNT Special Collections Research Fellowship.

ANTICIPATED APPLICATION DEADLINE: JANUARY 15, 2023, CHECK THE WEBSITE FOR UPDATES

Southern Methodist University, Dallas

The DeGolyer Library is the principal repository at SMU for special collections in the humanities. The Dorothy Sloan Fellowship Fund supports scholars at any stage of their careers who plan to pursue research on bibliographical projects or women’s history at the DeGolyer Library. Application information can be found here.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 15, 2022