By Rana Issa, Department of English, American University of Beirut, and 2017–2018 Houghton Visiting Fellow I love the archive. Mostly, I love all the wonderful scraps of paper that do not have any direct bearing on the stories I like to tell. Scraps that encapsulate their own story and that may not fit into seamless Read More
Houghton Fellows
Now in Print: Reconstructing the Personal Library of William James by Ermine Algaier
A hearty congratulations to 2017–2018 Houghton Visiting Fellow Ermine L. Algaier IV, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Monmouth College in Illinois, who recently published his book, Reconstructing the Personal Library of William James: Markings and Marginalia from the Harvard Library Collection (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Dr. Algaier provides a comprehensive account Read More
A Year on Fellowship at Houghton Library
In a recent post, we encouraged scholars who live a distance from Cambridge to apply for a Houghton Visiting Fellowship. The post has all the details, but the long and short of it is that winners receive $3,600 to support at least four weeks (not necessarily consecutively) of research at Houghton. Fellows get to really Read More
Accessing Archives in the 19th-Century Atlantic World
By Derek Kane O’Leary I have everywhere found Archivists the least competent of human beings to judge of the character or value of historical papers; and if I had not been favored with the aid of higher powers, both in Paris and London, my enquiries would have been to little purpose. There Archivists look upon Read More
Surprises and Suddenness in Edward Lear
By Noreen Masud, 2018–2019 Houghton Library Visiting Fellow/Eleanor M. Garvey Fellow in Printing and Graphic Arts, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Durham University. She works on topics including aphorisms, culinary leftovers, flatness, and hymns in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. Owls and Pussycats going to sea, Old Men with beards full of birds, Pobbles Read More