Since its founding, the Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has been an important resource for undergraduates. Founder Harry Ransom believed that a meaningful undergraduate education was not complete without exposure to rare books and manuscripts.

The Ransom Center continues to maintain this vision to encourage undergraduate interaction with its collections and is launching a new resource that provides information about the many opportunities available to undergraduates.

An undergraduate can read The Grapes of Wrath and then visit the Ransom Center to view the handwritten journal John Steinbeck kept while writing the novel. Undergraduates can attend more than 50 free programs throughout the year to hear a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, view a performance, or watch a film screening. Undergraduates can absorb a semester's worth of material on a given topic in a single Ransom Center exhibition. While sitting in the Reading and Viewing Room alongside leading scholars from around the world, an undergraduate can prepare to write an original research paper based on the archives of such luminaries as poet Anne Sexton, actor Robert De Niro, or writer Samuel Beckett. Undergraduate interns, work-study students, and student volunteers gain experience assisting with exhibitions, cataloging projects, and publicity campaigns.

Through exposure to and interaction with collection materials -- whether it be a manuscript, photograph, artwork, or rare book -- students can open the door to the creative...

The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archive of novelist and short-story writer Tom Coraghessan "T. C." Boyle, author of such acclaimed...

In May 2011, five Magnum photographers and one writer hopped on an R.V. at the Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, and launched a two-week road...

Saturday marks the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Maurice Ravel's "Mother Goose" ballet suite. Just in time for its centennial, a Ravel scholar has discovered that orchestras have been playing the piece incorrectly for the past 100 years.

Nearly five decades after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library & Museum on Tuesday, warning that Texas may be undermining that law.

Holder's much-anticipated...

Two days after Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords was severely injured in a Tucson shooting, renowned journalist Bill Moyers found himself sitting in a radiology lab awaiting an MRI for a torn muscle. The only other person in the waiting...

In August 2010, Time magazine announced that the search was over; Jonathan Franzen was the "Great American Novelist." In response, The New Yorker reported that "the white whale has been vanquished. Ahab, bless his addled soul, can rest...

While studying art history in graduate school, novelist Nicole Krauss spent hours in the library researching Rembrandt, only to find that she preferred imagining the details of his life instead.

"Beyond looking at his paintings, no amount of...

"What can I possibly say!!?!?"

Thus begins a 1965 letter from comedian Joan Rivers to future New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow. In the letter, located in Gussow's archive at the Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at...