Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, recently launched the Ralph Ellison Center, a new academic initiative for artists and writers at the liberal arts college.
Ellison, a Black American author and scholar, is best known for his novel, Invisible Man (Random House, 1952), which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953. He attended Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) from 1933 to 1936, but he never completed his degree. Later in life, Ellison taught at several higher education institutions, including at Bard College from 1958 to 1961.
The Ralph Ellison Center will serve as the new home for the Ralph Ellison archive. Currently housed at the Library of Congress, the archive will undergo an extensive digitization project by students, faculty, and other scholars. The center will also host several programs, including the Ralph Ellison Lectures, a bi-annual convening that invites distinguished scholars to deliver a series of addresses reflecting on Ellison’s stature across artistic and intellectual thought. The lectureship will also be presented at a partnering HBCU.
Additionally, Bard College’s new initiative will annually support an artist-in-residence and writer-in-residence, as well as a group of Ellison Student Scholars, who will receive a stipend to help facilitate events and immerse themselves in the academic and artistic work of the center. The center will also offer an intensive two-week paid internship for students at Bard and partnering HBCUs.
Nicholas Lewis, Bard College’s associate vice president for academic initiatives and associate dean of Bard College, has been selected to lead the new center.
“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.”
