Harry Ransom CenterThe University of Texas at Austin

Director's Note

Thomas F. Staley. Photo by Gregg Cestaro.

From the magnificent Pforzheimer collection of English literature to the page proofs of Joyce's Ulysses, from the First Photograph to the plays of Tom Stoppard and Arthur Miller, the Ransom Center's collections are dazzling in their range and stunning in their originality.

The Ransom Center is indeed a fine institution, but I believe that the most exciting years are yet to come. We continue to expand and deepen our twentieth-century collections, acquiring the archives of major figures—such as Norman Mailer and David Mamet—who will likely form the foundation of culture in the next century. We have also reached a critical threshold in the expansion of our research mission. Our fellowship program has become one of the largest of its kind, supporting the research of more than 40 scholars each year who join several thousand others at the Center to study among our collections. And we are reaching the broader public in greater numbers than ever before with our exhibitions and programs, which have drawn more than 350,000 visitors to the Center since the completion of our building renovation.

As we celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2007, we both reflect on our past and plan for another 50 years of growing strength. We look forward to welcoming future generations of scholars, students, and visitors, for whom we are rigorously and energetically building collections that will continue to make the Ransom Center a required stop on any cultural tour of the planet.

Thomas F. Staley
Director

Biography

Dr. Thomas F. Staley is Director of the Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is also Professor of English and holds The Harry Huntt Ransom Chair in Liberal Arts.

Staley has written or edited thirteen books on James Joyce, Italo Svevo, modern British women novelists, including Jean Rhys and Dorothy Richardson, and modern literature in general. His critical articles on a wide range of subjects have appeared in journals in this country and abroad. He has been the chairman or co-chairman of four international James Joyce symposia in Dublin and Trieste, and is a board member and former president of the James Joyce Foundation. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Trieste in 1966 and again in 1971. Among his most recent books are An Annotated Critical Bibliography of James Joyce (1989), an edited edition of The Paris Diaries of Stuart Gilbert (1993), and Writing the Lives of Writers (1998).

Staley is the founding editor of the James Joyce Quarterly, which he edited for 26 years. In 1990, he initiated Joyce Studies Annual, published under the auspices of the Ransom Center at The University of Texas Press. He currently edits a series on literary modernism at The University of Texas Press.

He has written and spoken widely in the United States and Europe on literary subjects, libraries, the state of the humanities in contemporary culture, and, more recently, the building of modern library collections.