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The hardest part of my move to Stanford from the University of Texas in 2004 was leaving the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, where I had taught a graduate seminar on "Century's End: Race, Gender and Ethnicity at the Turn-of-The-Century, 1890-1914" for several years. I needn't have worried. Bill McPheron, curator for American & British literature, contacted me shortly after I arrived at Stanford, wanting to know how my teaching and research needs would intersect with what the library had to offer. The course required students to immerse themselves in the primary materials of the period, and Bill could not have been more helpful in guiding me through Stanford's Special Collections. John Mustain, rare books librarian, helped me assemble a massive list of Special Collections and other library materials relevant to the topics in the course. Annette Keogh, assistant curator for American & British Literature, prepared an introductory talk in which she customized her orientation tour of online resources, as well as library holdings, to my syllabus. As a result of these generous efforts, my students were off and running in no time, making use of everything from first editions of books by Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, amongst others, to a pictorial souvenir volume from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, a run of The Atlantic Monthly, an 1890s book of photographs entitled Types of the Sunny South, an 1897 book about "the race problem," a scrapbook kept by Stanford women students, Lydia Pinkham's 1907 Private Text-book Upon Ailments Peculiar to Women, a 1913 book on Women in Science, and scores of dime novels and pieces of sheet music from the period.
I already knew the joys of Stanford Libraries, for I had written my last book here during a sabbatical the year before I was recruited. At Berkeley's Bancroft Library I had found the manuscript of a never-published, never-produced play Mark Twain wrote in 1898. But nearly every book I required to research the complex issues surrounding the play from studies of Barbizon school painting (the protagonist of the play is Jean-François Millet), to books about New York theatre in the 1890s-was here. When I sent the manuscript of Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts by Mark Twain to the University of California Press, Stanford libraries figured prominently in my acknowledgements. Truth be told, these libraries played as much a role as my colleagues did in recruiting me to Stanford.
This past year, as president of the American Studies Association, I've needed books and articles by American Studies colleagues who teach and publish outside the U.S. Remarkably, many of the materials were already in Green. I've also had access to online journals published all over the world, essential to my research. My presidential address, "Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies," reflects the literally hundreds of books and articles from Stanford libraries that I used this past year. [See it at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_quarterly/toc/aq57.1.html]
I find it enormously exciting that Stanford University Libraries are playing such a leading role in the process of transforming the structures of knowledge through the collaborative digitization venture with Google. I have found university librarian Mike Keller to be a man of vision and wisdom, and I look forward to keeping abreast of this project as a member of the Committee on Libraries next year.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Shelley Fisher Fishkin's broad, interdisciplinary research interests have led her to focus on topics including the ways in which American writers' apprenticeships in journalism shaped their poetry and fiction; the influence of African American voices on canonical American literature; the need to desegregate American literary studies; the development of feminist criticism; the relationship between public history and literary history; and the challenge of doing transnational American Studies. Although much of her work has centered on Mark Twain, she has also published on writers including Gloria Anzaldua, John Dos Passos, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tillie Olsen, and Walt Whitman.
Fishkin is the author, editor or co-editor of forty books and has published over eighty articles, essays and reviews, most recently Mark Twain at the Turn of the Century, 1890-1910 (Arizona Quarterly, 2005); and 'Sport of the Gods' and Other Essential Writing by Paul Laurence Dunbar (Random House, 2005). Her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. She is a professor of English and is director of Stanford's American Studies Program.
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