Harry Ransom Center Podcast

Irish novelist Sebastian Barry reads from The Secret Scripture, his new work that was recently chosen for the longlist for the Man Booker Prize.

Author Alan Furst reads from his latest book, The Spies of Warsaw.

Documentary photographer and Journalism School Associate Professor Donna DeCesare discusses photojournalism and the legacies of violence in El Salvador's civil war with exhibitions intern Joey Kolker.

Associate Professor of History Virginia Burnett speaks with exhibitions intern Joey Kolker about memory and human rights in El Salvador, 15 years after the signing of peace accords that ended the country's civil war. Burnett is a co-organizer of the April 2008 conference Image, Memory, and the Paradox of Peace.

Jim Canary is a conservator at Indiana University's Lilly Library, but he also has the job of caring for Jack Kerouac's scroll manuscript of On the Road. While in Austin to install the scroll, Jim spoke with Molly Schwartzburg, curator of On the Road with the Beats. Canary discusses how he got the job of caring for this unique 120-foot document and why he thinks Kerouac's looking down and laughing at the attention given to the scroll now.

Harry Ransom Center Associate Curator of Art Peter Mears speaks with Public Affairs intern Anne Fruge about the life and work of the artist featured in the current exhibition Jess: To and From the Printed Page. The exhibition focuses on the influential San Francisco artist known as "Jess" (Burgess Collins) that explores his ongoing dialogue between visual images and printed text. Imaginative collage works and paintings derived from poetry, literary classics, and even the Sunday comics are featured.

Molly Schwartzburg, Curator of British and American Literature at the Ransom Center, curated the current exhibition On the Road with the Beats. She speaks with Ransom Center Public Affairs Assistant Alicia Dietrich to give a behind-the-scenes look at some of the items in the exhibition and the challenges she faced in organizing and choosing items for the show.

Norman Mailer visited the Ransom Center for the 2006 Flair Symposium, The Sense of Our Time: Norman Mailer and America in Conflict. During Mailer's visit, Robert Fulton, the Ransom Center's former Curator of Academic Affairs, interviewed Norman Mailer, his son John Buffalo Mailer, and Norman Mailer's sister, Barbara Mailer Wasserman.

Ransom Center Advisory Council Member Robert Franden spoke with author James Salter about his archive, his writing process, and his acclaimed book Light Years.