Professor Tom Palaima, curator Michael Chaiken, and Harry Ransom Center director Tom Staley present the third lecture of spring 2017: Bob Dylan: The Next Generation.
Tom Palaima is Armstrong Centennial Professor and Director, Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP). He received the UT Alumni/ae Association’s Jean Holloway Award for Excellence in Teaching 2003-2004 and the Plan II Chad Oliver Teaching Award in 2004-2005. A MacArthur fellow for his work on ancient archives, Aegean prehistory and early Greek language and culture, he has long studied, written and taught seminars about the human response to experiences of war and violence. This includes folk and popular songs from Homer to Bob Dylan and beyond.
From his perspective as a scholar of ancient archives and of the music of Bob Dylan, Palaima will lay out the particular challenges connected with creating an archives of the most fully documented poet and songster in human history in “Introduction: How Do We Archive America’s Homer?”
Michael Chaiken is the Curator of The Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, OK.
He is an archivist, film programmer, and Curator of the Bob Dylan Archive at the Helmerich Center for American Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His archival work includes the collections of Nicholas Ray, Pennebaker-Hegedus Films and Renata Adler. As a film programmer, he has organized touring retrospectives of the work of Norman Mailer, Luc Moullet, Dick Fontaine, Albert and David Maysles, and Pierre Clémenti.
In “Archive Fever Dreams: From Late Antiquity to Dylan.” Chaiken will discuss his experience over the past decade as an archivist with emphasis on the unique characteristics of the Dylan collection.
Tom Staley was director of the Harry Ransom Center from 1988 to 2013. He is professor emeritus of the department of English and Fellow of the C. B. Smith, Sr., Nash Phillips, Clyde Copus Centennial Chair honoring Harry Huntt Ransom. A noted James Joyce scholar, in his 25 years as director of the Harry Ransom Center he orchestrated the acquisition of the papers and archives of figures who define our culture: Norman Mailer, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert De Niro, Tom Stoppard, Stella Adler, Doris Lessing, Bernard Malamud, David Mamet, Tim O’Brien and the Watergate materials of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. In “What Did HR See?: UT’s Harry Huntt Ransom Center Vision and Realization.” Staley will discuss what the archives means for Texas, American and western culture and what it will mean going forward from his unique perspective as director of the HRC for a quarter century.
