Donors help fund travel costs for visiting researchers

Alex Mouw visited the Upper Midwest Literary Archives (UMLA) eight years ago and knew that he needed to come back. Mouw, a doctoral candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, is currently working on his dissertation, “Poets Against History: American Lyric and Historiography after 1945.”

During his first visit to UMLA, Mouw reviewed the papers of John Berryman, a poet and lecturer at the University of Minnesota. Berryman, he realized, deserved more attention in his dissertation. But crossing state lines for research is expensive. Mouw was able to return thanks to the Elmer L. Andersen research scholars program. The program — which relies on financial contributions from donors — provides finacial support to faculty, graduate, post-graduate, and independent researchers who need to access materials from Archives and Special Collections for their work.

“The Andersen Research Scholars made it possible for a graduate student to come back to travel to Minnesota and stay there for a few days,” Mouw said. “I loved the archives. You read one thing from one folder, and all of a sudden that gives you a reason to jump boxes to something far afield. And [Erin McBrien, the UMLA curator,] was extremely hospitable in not only helping me get things, but helping me discover things that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.”

Mouw knew, for example, that in 1957 Berryman taught overseas under a U.S. Department of State program designed to promote American literature and ideals abroad. But at the archives he learned that Berryman had applied to such a program years earlier and had been rebuffed.

“That was really helpful for me because it suggests that his very American exceptionalist poem, ‘Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,’ published in 1956, changed his reputation in such a way that he became a suitable figure to participate in that Cold War cultural project,” Mouw explained.

This won’t be Mouw’s last trip to the UMLA. He’s also planning to see the James Wright papers and the Graywolf Press records. The archives helped make his literary scholarship “more robust” because he can now offer not only new interpretations, but new information, he said.

“I am not seeing things that no one has ever seen before, but I am bringing things together that no one has brought together in this exact sequence, and bringing things that are not published. I think it expands the field in a more significant way,” he said.

Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, another Andersen research scholar, visited the University Archives earlier this year for his research project on the long history of non-indigenous discoveries and disturbances of Indigenous burial sites in Minnesota.

Smiles is a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and grew up in Minneapolis, and he now works as an assistant professor in the department of geography at the University of Victoria in Canada.

“The University archivists were really great to work with, just tremendously helpful. [University Archivist] Erik Moore stopped by a number of times while I was in the reading room,” he said. “I really, really liked the archives. That’s such an amazing space at Andersen Library. I have nothing but great things to say about the Libraries. They’re just really supportive of research.”