News Release — December 2, 2010

Call for Applications for Mellon Summer Institute in Spanish Paleography at Harry Ransom Center

Applications are being accepted by the Harry Ransom Center for the Mellon Summer Institute in Spanish Paleography, occurring in Austin June 6-24, 2011. The institute is an opportunity for scholars to acquire intensive training in reading late medieval and early modern manuscripts of Spain and Latin America.

Application materials must be received by Tuesday, March 1, 2011. Late applications will not be reviewed.

Manuscripts from the collections of the Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, and the university's Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection will be used to supplement and enrich course content. Attention will also be given to research tools for using the archives of other manuscript repositories.

This institute will enroll 15 participants, and the course will be conducted in Spanish. First consideration will be given to advanced graduate students and junior faculty from colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, but applications will also be accepted from professional staff from museums and libraries and from independent scholars. Participants, who must have advanced Spanish language skills, will receive a stipend to help defray the costs of housing and travel.

Participants will learn to transcribe a variety of Spanish documentary and book scripts found in primary sources from Spain and the Americas in the late medieval and early modern periods, ranging from the 15th to the 18th centuries.

Dr. Consuelo Varela, of Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, will lead the institute. Varela has published extensively on Christopher Columbus, the early years of the discovery of America and Spanish voyages across the Pacific. She taught the Summer Institute in the Spanish and Hispanic-American Archival Sciences at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1996 and 2002.

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.