Bard College Opens Ralph Ellison Center, Acquires Author's Copyright Rights

Bard College announced that it has opened the Ralph Ellison Center on its bucolic, Annandale-on-Hudson campus, where Ellison taught from 1958-1961. The new academic initiative and home perpetuates the prolific American figure's artistic and intellectual spirit by convening students, affiliate and visiting faculty, and resident artists and writers through programs, internships, and fellowships at Bard College that operate in conversation with Ellison's expansive range as a writer, artist, and thinker. Key initiatives of the Center include biannual flagship lectureships and the digitization of the Ellison archive, currently held at the Library of Congress, to secure his legacy in the modern age.

The Ellison Center, run by Nicholas Lewis, Associate Vice President for Academic Initiatives and Associate Dean of Bard College, is made possible by an agreement between Bard College and the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust. The Trust has transferred all copyrights, intellectual property rights, and claims to royalties to Bard, with John Callahan, who served as the literary executor of the Ellison estate since his passing, being appointed to serve as a senior fellow of the Center alongside Donn Zaretsky, a legal representative of the Trust.

“The Ralph Ellison Center will inspire artists and intellectuals to explore and address the substantive issues of our time through the same philosophy that drove Ellison to operate as one of the canonical American cultural figures of the twentieth century,” said Lewis. “Bard College's history of fearless, interdisciplinary pursuit makes the college the ideal site to incubate artistry and scholarship anchored by the figure of Ralph Ellison.”

“For nearly twenty years, the Trust was largely about preserving Ellison's legacy and bringing more of his work into the world,” said Callahan. “We came to think of the Center as the next phase of the project: putting that legacy to work through new scholarship, new art, and new opportunities for students.”

Having inherited the rights to the Ralph Ellison archive at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Center will embark on an ambitious digitization project to advance the tools scholars use to engage in research on Ellison and create a digital archive that enables the sharing of knowledge with other academic and cultural institutions and the general public. The Center will host a robust regranting program to support national and global scholarly engagement with the Ellison archive and training in archival practices to facilitate ongoing contributions to the digital repository.

The flagship event of the Ralph Ellison Center will be The Ralph Ellison Lectures, a biannual convening that invites distinguished scholars to deliver a series of addresses reflecting on Ellison's stature across artistic and intellectual thought. This lectureship will also be presented at a partnering Historically Black College or University, many of which Bard is already connected to through existing relationships and programs. Each lecture will be subsequently published by a university press.

Alongside Callahan and Zaretsky, the Ralph Ellison Center's cohort of artists and intellectuals will include affiliate faculty and staff fellows from Bard's main campus on Annandale-on-Hudson and international campus-based programs, and visiting faculty fellows and exchanges. The Center will also support an artist-in-residence and writer-in-residence, as well as a group of Ellison Student Scholars each year, who will receive a stipend to help facilitate Center events and immerse themselves in the academic and artistic work perpetuated by the Center. A cornerstone activity of the Center will be a series of salon events in which students, faculty, and staff can congregate, connect, and converse on pre-selected themes or in response to Center events.

To foster the next generation of Ellison scholars, the Center will offer an intensive two-week paid internship that brings together students from across the Bard network and from partner HBCUs. Student scholars will spend one week at Bard's New York campus, visiting prominent cultural institutions while participating in immersive training in archival practices and research. In the second week, students will travel to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to support the work of digitizing portions of the Ellison archive while also conducting independent research projects pursuant to Ralph Ellison.