I’ve gotten used to pursuing something—a question, a person, a poem—single-mindedly through the archive. As a doctoral student interested in book history and the archive, each semester of coursework seemed to bring with it a new project, a new question, and a new archive, all of which I needed to find a way to cram into a palatable seminar paper in a few months. My archival adventures—both digital and physical—have thus been guided by a need to rush, and this rush taught me to weed through seeming detritus, looking for the three (or five, or eleven) documents that could form the backbone of a good paper.
My instinct to rush, however, was thwarted even as I traveled to New Haven, CT, to visit the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Despite all my planning, my plane to Hartford was delayed, I couldn’t easily find the bus from the airport to the train station, and, when I finally arrived at the station, I waited for hours for the train to New Haven. By the time I arrived at the Beinecke, I had lost some of the time I allotted to spend there, and I was frantic. I had to find the materials I needed. An archival trip like this trip—one only possible with the help of a Lambda Iota Tau (LIT) Research Grant—could not be made in vain.
Once I was finally settled at the Beinecke, the archivists efficiently and kindly helped me get to work by pulling materials from the Langston Hughes Papers and the Carl Van Vechten Papers for me to examine. I had assumed these were the two figures I should be concerned with if I wanted to explore Hughes’s relationship to Vanity Fair. Van Vechten, after all, had orchestrated Hughes’s publication in the pages of the magazine. As I paged through letters related to Vanity Fair in both collections, however, I began to be more and more interested in a third figure: Margaret Case, one of Vanity Fair‘s editors.
As a person predisposed to rush, Case’s letters were frustrating. They hopped from topic to topic, often including meandering thoughts that were unrelated to the business of the magazine. Her letters to Van Vechten, with whom she was friends, were especially random. A small comment on Hughes could be followed by a couple pages of musings on the scene outside her window or silly limericks written to pass the time at work. More often than not, these letters also contained Case’s simple stick figure doodles. Forced to read these letters slowly in order not to miss anything, I gradually discovered that I was becoming more and more engrossed in Case’s letters. I even found myself studying her stick figures.
Although they were not the primary items I went to the Beinecke to find, Case’s letters were the papers that gave me the most on this archival visit, and not just in the sense that they enabled me to develop my project on Hughes and Vanity Fair. Her letters reminded me of what many archival scholars come to proclaim. Getting lost and sidetracked in the archive is inevitable, and often necessary, to be productive. Sometimes you just have to sit with the stick figures.
Nicole Salama
Lambda Iota Tau (LIT) Research Grant Recipient, 2024
Alpha Epsilon Mu Chapter
Loyola University, Chicago, IL
Lambda Iota Tau (LIT) Research Grant
Lambda Iota Tau (LIT) Research Grants are designed to support individual members at the undergraduate or graduate level as they complete original research that furthers the goals of the Society. Grant money of up to $1,000, with up to $500 for runners-up, will support travel to and use of archives or collections important to their research. The winning applicants will demonstrate the relevance of the research to English and English-related fields and may also describe the effect on current coursework, future research, or career pursuits.
Application Deadline: April 7, 2025—All research travel and the resulting written or presented outcome must be completed before May 2026.
Past LIT Grant Recipients
Visiting Dickinson and Plath with a LIT Grant
My LIT Grant Adventures in the Alice Archive
Turning Pain into Poetry with a LIT Grant
An Idea, An Idea—A LIT Research Grant
Discarded Garbage: Poetic Images of Humanity
Writing On Both Sides, A Tale of Literary Obsession
What Do I Write?
More from Footnotes: April 1, 2025
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