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26 September 2021 / Lectures
‘Preserving Performance: Collecting at the Harry Ransom Center’
Image: Ball weight and chain | Harry Houdini Collection. All images courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center
Free online talk by STR member Dr Eric Colleary of the Harry Ransom Center, Texas
The Harry Ransom Center is an international humanities research center at The University of Texas in Austin.
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.
Take a peek into the collections with Performing Arts Curator Eric Colleary.
Register for this talk on Eventbrite
There will be time for questions.
Dr Eric Colleary is the Cline Curator of Theatre & Performing Arts at the Harry Ransom Center, an international humanities research library, archive, and museum. He holds a PhD in Theatre Historiography from the University of Minnesota. His research has focused on the relationship between performance, history and sexual identity and the ways that archives construct and perform identities over time. Currently, he is working on a book about British interwar theatre and is actively collecting material documenting the impact of the events of 2020 on the theatre profession.
This FREE event is organised by the Friends of the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, a registered charity. Donations very welcome – see option when you register. Thank you!
New members welcome too. Bristol Theatre Collections
Or email us: theatrecollection-friends@bristol.ac.uk