By Madeleine Klebanoff O’Brien Last summer I conducted independent research at Houghton Library through Harvard’s remote Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program undergraduate fellowship. Inspired by Houghton’s collections, I created an allegorical map of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The Comedy follows Dante through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. It is a cosmography, a “total vision” of…
Announcing the Winner of the Inaugural American Trust for the British Library Fellowship at Houghton Library
The American Trust for the British Library (ATBL) and Houghton Library are pleased to announce that Lauren Eriks Cline, Assistant Professor of English at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, has been awarded the first American Trust for the British Library Fellowship at Houghton Library. This visiting fellowship, a joint initiative between the two institutions, supports a…
Announcing Houghton’s 2020-2021 New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Fellows
The New England Regional Fellowship Consortium consists of 30 major cultural agencies. Annually, NERFC offers about two dozen $5,000 grants so researchers in a broad array of fields can conduct a minimum of eight weeks of research at several participating institutions, which include Houghton Library, Baker Library, the Harvard Law School Library, and the Harvard University…
A Missionary Recipe to Celebrate Christmas
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Beauty and Cliché in an Anonymous French Manuscript Score
By Joseph Gauvreau, Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. Joseph was a summer 2018 Pforzheimer Fellow in Harvard Library. Working closely with Christina Linklater (a Houghton music cataloger and keeper of the Isham Memorial Library in the Loeb Music Library), he reported a number of Harvard’s music manuscript holdings to RISM. Joseph’s essay is published in…
An Intimate and Symbolic Bond: Quentin Roosevelt, the Great War, and American-French Relations
By Vincent Harmsen, 2017–2018 Houghton Library Visiting Fellow and recipient of the William Dearborn Fellowship in American History. Mr. Harmsen holds a master’s degree in history from the Sorbonne University, Paris. November 19, 1918 would have been the twenty-first birthday of Quentin Roosevelt, son of Theodore Roosevelt. However, Quentin had died in France a few…