News Release — May 31, 2007

Fifteen Participants Selected for Mellon Summer Institute in Spanish Vernacular Paleography

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin will host 15 scholars in the Mellon Summer Institute in Spanish Vernacular Paleography from June 11 to 29.

Directed by Professor Carla Rahn Phillips, participants will acquire practical training in reading late medieval and early modern scripts of Spain and Latin America. The institute will concentrate on skills needed for the accurate reading and transcription of the wide variety of Spanish documentary and book scripts that scholars often encounter in historical and literary research in these fields.

Materials from the Ransom Center collections and the Benson Latin American Library will be used to supplement and enrich the course content. Some attention will also be given to research tools and the norms for using the principal archives and other manuscript repositories.

Phillips is the Union Pacific Professor in Comparative Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has published widely in the history of early modern Spain and its overseas empire and conducts research in public and private archives in Europe and the United States.

Phillips regularly offers a practicum in Spanish paleography for her graduate students and taught the Mellon Summer Seminar in Spanish Paleography at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., in 2005. For her complete curriculum vitae, see the Web site of the History Department at the University of Minnesota.

The Institute is part of a four-year initiative for vernacular paleography supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and headquartered at the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies.