Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos. Front and back of press print “Nicaragua: 1978” from Magnum Photos collection.

Ileana Selejan, Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, recently spent time in the Magnum Photos collection with a dissertation fellowship from the Ransom Center. Selejan’s work focuses on aesthetics in war photography and protest art at the turn of the 1980s, specifically on the Sandinista revolution, the counter revolutionary war in Nicaragua.

The primary resource I consulted while in residency at the Harry Ransom Center between October and November 2011 was the Magnum Photos collection. I was interested in photographs taken in Nicaragua during the 1978–1979 Sandinista revolution and the subsequent Contra War until circa 1989, and I mainly looked at work…

'Nicaragua, June 1978–July 1979' by Susan Meiselas.

Erina Duganne, Assistant Professor of Art History at Texas State University, visited the Ransom Center on a Marlene Nathan Meyerson Photography Fellowship for a month during the summer of 2011 to review photographs by Susan Meiselas in the Magnum Photos collection. This research relates to her forthcoming book that examines the act of bearing witness in photography from the 1970s through the 1990s. She is also presenting her findings on Meiselas at the annual conference of the Association of American Studies. The Ransom Center is now accepting applications for 2012-2013 fellowships. Duganne discusses her research here.

For this fellowship, I closely examined press photographs in the Magnum Photos collection that Susan Meiselas took of the…

David Douglas Duncan. ‘Aramcovid derrick at Abqaiq. Bedouin caravan to oblivion.’ Saudi Arabia, 1947.

Katherine Slusher, an art curator and writer based in Barcelona was a David Douglas Duncan Fellow at the Ransom Center in 2009. She writes about her research in the Duncan collection, which documents his travels all over the world as a photojournalist.

Slusher’s article highlights Duncan’s extensive travels to the Florida Everglades, the Caribbean, South America, Central America, Afghanistan, Egypt, Persia, and Turkey as he captured iconic images for such publications as LIFE Magazine.

The Ransom Center annually awards more than 50 fellowships to support scholarly research projects that require on-site use of its collections. The Center is receiving applications for its 2011-2012 fellowships in the humanities.

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The locations of the 2010-11 fellowship recipients. ©Rand McNally Map. Click on map to enlarge.

The Ransom Center has awarded more than 60 research fellowships for 2010–11.

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

The scholars, almost half of whom will be coming from abroad, will use Ransom Center materials to support projects with such titles as “William Faulkner’s Early Career: A Chronology,” “Cogs in the Dream Machine: Jack Harris and the Role of ‘Still Men’ in Promoting Hollywood Cinema,” “Jimmy Hare and the Beginnings of Photojournalism” and “Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles.”

The fellowships range from one to three months in duration, offering funds…