The Anscombe Archive
Through the support and generosity of Mr. James N. Perry (C’82), a former member of the Penn School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers, Dr. Matthew O’Brien of the Collegium Institute, and Mr. Vincenzo La Ruffa (C’02), and through a collaboration between the Penn Department of Philosophy and PRRUCS, the Collegium Institute Anscombe Archive was transferred to the Penn Library’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, where it will be housed and studied through June 2022. This study will build upon an invaluable preliminary cataloging of the Anscombe Archive, which was undertaken by Dr. Luke Gormally, who along with his wife, Dr. Mary Geach, the daughter of Anscombe, stewarded the Archive from Anscombe’s death in 2001 until its acquisition by the Collegium Institute.
Item List
Click the image above or here to see the full, itemized list of what you’ll find within the Archive. You can also click here to view the working finding aid developed by Marie Barnett, Anscombe Archive specialist and doctoral student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, to accompany the archive.
Visit the Archive
The University of Pennsylvania has lifted Covid-19 restrictions on outside scholars visiting the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, which houses the Collegium Institute Anscombe Archive. Both Penn and non-Penn scholars may inquire about visiting the archive in person here.
In addition, a limited number of travel grant opportunities may be available to outside scholars in the future in order to conduct research on the archive in the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and to deliver a lecture or workshop while here. To inquire about applying for such opportunities, contact us at anscombe.archive@collegiuminstitute.org.
Archival Item Request
In July of 2020, Collegium Institute received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, enabling us to begin digitizing the documents from the Anscombe Archive. After reviewing the Item List, scholars seeking access to documents in the Archive for research purposes may submit a request to review up to 5 items using this request form. Please note that not all items have been digitized yet. You can expect to hear back from a Collegium staff member within 3-5 business days of submitting the form. If your request is approved, you will then be required to submit this photo duplication self-service permission form before receiving access to the documents.
Prior to submitting any drafts for review to a journal or any other publication, candidates who wish to publish quotations from or images of any archival material should submit to Collegium Institute a request for provisional approval using this form. Your request should include an up-to-date description of the project, a list of the quotations to be used, and a draft of the manuscript in which they would appear.