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Ray Bradbury Center
Founded	2007
Founders	Jonathan R. Eller William F. Touponce
Type	Public non-profit
Purpose	"The mission of the Bradbury Center is to fully document, preserve, and provide public access to its large and diverse collection of Space-Age visionary author Ray Bradbury’s literary works, art, artifacts, personal office, personal library, correspondence, typescripts, manuscripts, photographs, mementoes, audiovisual materials and juvenilia; to enable visiting scholars and students to conduct research; to continue its outreach programming in the Indianapolis community, throughout Indiana, nationally, and internationally, with an emphasis on reaching high school teachers, students, and librarians; and to continue publishing our annual scholarly journal The New Ray Bradbury Review."
Headquarters	Indianapolis, Indiana
Services	Research, outreach, publishing
Director	Jason Aukerman
Assistant Director	Carrie Cooper
Key people	Jordan Brinker Nancy Orem Max Goller Kylie Adkins
Parent organization	School of Liberal Arts, Indiana University Indianapolis
Website	liberalarts.indianapolis.iu.edu/centers/bradbury-center/
Formerly called	Center for Ray Bradbury Studies

The Ray Bradbury Center is a publicly accessible, single-author archive dedicated to scholarship on the work of Ray Bradbury and science fiction. It is based on the campus of the Indiana University branch in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Center is home to more than 100,000 pages of published and unpublished literary works stored in thirty-one of the author’s filing cabinets; forty years of Bradbury’s personal and professional correspondence (an additional 10,000 pages); and author’s copies of Bradbury books, including extensive foreign language editions, and his working library (a combined 4000 volumes).

History

The Center was founded in 2007 by Bradbury scholars Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce. Eller had met and befriended Bradbury while teaching at the United States Air Force Academy, which was hosting a science fiction conference. In 1993, Eller relocated to Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis to teach, where Touponce was already on the faculty. In 2007, with material support from Bradbury's principal bibliographer Donn Albright that had begun the 1980s, Eller and Touponce persuaded the university to establish the then Center for Ray Bradbury Studies in order to help preserve Bradbury's legacy and to bring his life and work into the literary and academic mainstream.

When Bradbury died, in 2012, Albright, to whom Bradbury had bequested hundreds of his books and thousands of pages of his manuscripts and related materials, passed on much of his bequest to the Center. This led the Bradbury family to gift their father’s office and a lifetime of his awards and mementos to the Center as well. The Center subsequently received over 18,000 pounds of artifacts, shipped from Bradbury's home in Los Angeles.

Collections

The Center has recreated Bradbury's basement office as it evolved in his home in Los Angeles, including original furniture such as his writing desk, paint table, bookshelves, and chairs. Also housed are more than 100,000 pages of published and unpublished literary works stored in thirty-one of the author’s filing cabinets, forty years of his personal and professional correspondence, extensive foreign language editions of his works in forty languages, and his working library (a combined 4,000 volumes).

Highlights among the broader collection of papers and artifacts include a number of national awards; a Mars flag that rode in the Space Shuttle Discovery; a replica of the Nautilus from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, sculpted by Disney Imagineers and gifted to Bradbury in the 1960s; and an asbestos-bound edition of Fahrenheit 451.

The New Ray Bradbury Review

In 1952, William F. Nolan published what stands as a predecessor to the current Review, a one-volume Ray Bradbury Review, which included articles, stories, book reviews, and an index of Bradbury's work. The New Ray Bradbury Review is the central publication of the Center, having been established in 2008 and edited by William Touponce. It has a broad scope and is designed primarily to study the impact of Ray Bradbury’s writings on American culture. Over its run it has also been edited by Jonathan Eller and Bradbury scholar Phil Nichols, who also hosts the Bradbury 100 podcast and Bradbury 101 video series.

Volumes 1-6, from 2008-2019, were published by Kent State University Press. As of volume 7 (2023), it has moved to an open access online format, edited by Nichols.