In the spring of 2007, IUPUI's School of Liberal Arts created the nation's first center for the study of science fiction and fantasy author Ray Bradbury (1920–2012), one of the best-known American cultural figures of the twentieth century. During his seven-decade career, Bradbury published more than four hundred stories and the books that grew out of them, including The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The October Country, and two enduring titles that emerged from his early Midwestern years—Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Fahrenheit 451, his classic cautionary tale of censorship and book burning, remains a perennial bestseller more than sixty years after publication.
With the encouragement of the late Mr. Bradbury and a number of scholars, fellow writers, and collectors, the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies has been able to build a comprehensive multiple-source research archive. The Center has gone on to establish, in partnership with the Kent State University Press, a journal, The New Ray Bradbury Review, and a Modern Language Association seal-approved critical edition, The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, an eight-volume series that recovers the seldom-seen earliest versions of his oldest tales.
The Center also maintains a large research library of Bradbury's publications (including many foreign language editions of his books and scarce copies of the pulp genre magazines where many of his earliest stories were first published), as well as anthologies and reference books for the broader study of science fiction and fantasy.
During the fall of 2013, these resources were suddenly transformed into one of the nation’s premier single-author archives by the arrival of two landmark gifts that, together, comprise most of the working archives and personal artifacts remaining in Mr. Bradbury’s home at the time of his passing in June 2012. Mr. Bradbury’s longtime friend and principal bibliographer, Donn Albright, donated the author’s books and papers, which he had received as a personal bequest. The resulting Bradbury-Albright Collection now forms the centerpiece of what we have designated the Bradbury Memorial Archive, consisting of a direct gift to the Center from the Bradbury family. This gift consists of Mr. Bradbury’s office bookcases and furniture (including two desks and three typewriters dating from the 1950s), his voice recordings, selected motion picture and television adaptations of his work, his last forty years of incoming correspondence, and a lifetime of awards and mementos.
If you wish to contact the Center, please e-mail or write to the director:
Jonathan R. Eller
Director, Center for Ray Bradbury Studies
jeller@iupui.edu
A brief mission statement.
A brief history of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies.
Jonathan R. Eller (B.S., United States Air Force Academy, 1973; B.A., University of Maryland, 1979; M.A. (1981), Ph.D. (1985), Indiana University) is Professor of English, Director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, and Senior Textual Editor of the Institute for American Thought, a research component of Indiana University’s School of Liberal Arts (IUPUI). He co-founded the Bradbury Center within the Institute for American Thought in 2007, and became the Center’s director in August 2011.
In 1993 Eller retired from a twenty-year Air Force career and joined the faculty at IUPUI. Since 2000 he has edited or co-edited several limited press editions of Ray Bradbury's fiction, including The Halloween Tree (2005), Dandelion Wine (2007), and two collections of stories related to Bradbury’s publication of Fahrenheit 451 in 1953: Match to Flame (2006) and A Pleasure to Burn (2010). Eller’s most recent book, Becoming Ray Bradbury (2011), centers on Bradbury’s early life and development as a writer through the 1953 publication of Fahrenheit 451. He is presently writing a companion volume focusing on the middle decades of Bradbury’s career and his rise to cultural prominence. Professor Eller worked on Simon & Schuster’s sixtieth anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, published early in 2013.
Robin Condon, (B.A., Johns Hopkins University; M.A., University of Chicago; Ph.D.candidacy, University of Chicago). Editor, Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, and Textual Editor, Institute for American Thought. Condon served for six years as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers project before joining the Bradbury Center. She authored the volume introduction for the critical edition of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Yale University Press, 2013). She is currently writing about Douglass as a reader, and her interests include Bradbury and race as well as Bradbury as a twentieth-century historian. She is also working on a juvenile biography of Frederick Douglass, to be published by Blue River Press in 2015.
Associate Editor, The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, 2009 - Present
Senior Editorial Associate, Technical Peirce Edition Project, Institute for American Thought, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, 2001- 2008
Education
Certificate in Professional Editing, IUPUI, 2004
MLS, Indiana University, Bloomington, Sep 1984 - Dec. 1986
BA, Education, University of Evansville, Indiana, Sep. 1970 - June 1974
Associate of Arts, Commercial Art, Indiana Vocational Technical College, Evansville, Indiana. Sep.1980 - Aug. 1982
The following scholars, writers and bibliographers with strong connections to Ray Bradbury studies, serve as external advisors to the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies:
Donn Albright, Professor of Communication Design, Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, N.Y.) and Professor, Associate Degree Programs, Pratt Institute (Manhattan Center). Professor Albright has been Mr. Bradbury’s principal bibliographer since the late 1970s, and maintains the largest single collection of Bradbury manuscripts, books, multimedia work, and secondary source materials. Photocopies of major manuscripts from this collection will be deposited with the Center (see section 8 for a discussion of access procedures).
S. T. Joshi (M.A., Brown University), a well-known independent scholar in the fields of Fantasy and Supernatural Literature. Joshi is a leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, and other writers, mostly in the realms of supernatural and fantasy fiction. He has edited corrected editions of the works of Lovecraft, several annotated editions of Bierce and Mencken, and has written such critical studies as The Weird Tale (1990) and The Modern Weird Tale (2001). His award-winning biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), was followed by I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, (2 volumes, 2010). He has compiled bibliographies of H. P. Lovecraft (1981; revised 2009), Lord Dunsany (1993), Ramsey Campbell (1995), Ambrose Bierce (1999), Gore Vidal (2007), and H. L. Mencken (2009). He has also edited a major genre reference work, Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia (2005). He is collaborating with Jonathan R. Eller on a comprehensive bibliography of Ray Bradbury.
David Mogen, Professor (Emeritus) of English, Department of English, Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, Colorado 80523. Professor Mogen is the author of Ray Bradbury (G.K. Hall, 1986), Twayne’s United States Author’s Series volume on the first four decades of Bradbury’s career.
Phil Nichols, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader, School of Media, Faculty of Arts, University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. Senior Advisor to the Bradbury Center, Nichols is an expert in Bradbury’s screenwriting and work across all media. He maintains the most comprehensive on-line bibliography of Bradbury’s publications at his university-hosted Bradburymedia web site. He is a member of the Advisory Board of The New Ray Bradbury Review and a Consulting Editor on The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: a Critical Edition.
William F.Nolan, author and expert in genre fiction, was Bradbury’s principal bibliographer from the early 1950s through the mid-1970s. Mr. Nolan is author or editor of more than 70 books in a career that has spanned more than half a century. Among his science fiction titles are Logan’s Run, its two sequel novels, many short stories, and a number of well-received anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. His contributions to the field of mystery writing include the Black Mask detective series and two studies of Dashiell Hammett. He is twice winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award. In 2002 he received the “Living Legend” Award from the International Horror Guild. Nolan has also written for film and television. His Ray Bradbury Review (1952) and Ray Bradbury Companion (1975), along with dozens of other introductions, prefaces, and bibliographical checklists, have provided two generations of Bradbury readers and scholars with a point of departure for the study of Bradbury’s life and fiction.
Robin Anne Reid, Professor of English, Department of Literature and Languages, Texas A&M University-Commerce, Commerce TX 75429. Professor Reid is the author of Ray Bradbury (Greenwood Press, 2000). Her other publications in the Science Fiction field include a companion Greenwood Press study of Arthur C. Clarke.
Dr. Robert Woods, Professor of Great Books, Honors, and Liberal Arts, Faulkner University, Montgomery, Alabama. He holds the PhD in Humanities from Florida State University and has done considerable research in the area of literature and culture. He has made numerous presentations, published articles, and is currently completing a book on Fahrenheit 451. Dr. Woods serves as Head of the Great Books Honors College and Institute for the Study of Liberal Arts.
Since its inception in 2008, the Editorial Advisory Board for The New Ray Bradbury Review has consisted of Donn Albright, Jonathan R. Eller, Phil Nichols, and
Sarah Lawall, Professor Emerita, Comparative Literature, University of Massachusetts. Professor Lawall was one of the editors of The Norton Anthology of Western Literature, 8th edition, and author of Critics of Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).
Professor Eller, who will assume editorship of The New Ray Bradbury Review with issue 4 (2013-2014), will step down from the advisory board prior to the publication of that issue.
Institute for American Thought
0010 Education/Social Work
Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis
Indianapolis, Indiana, 46202-5157 USA
Phone: (317) 278-3374
Fax: (317) 274-2170
Email: iat@iupui.edu
