News from the Director of Research - May 2025
Welcome Shannon McHugh!
A former Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine, Shannon joined The Huntington in January from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she was Associate Professor of French and Italian. She is a scholar of exceptional range, with interests in Renaissance Italian poetry and contemporary fan culture and is working on a fascinating project on Walt Disney’s Library. She is also a dynamo who brings enormous energy and creativity to everything she does. She joins HLQ Editor Brett Rushforth, whom I introduced in the summer 2024 newsletter, as part of the academic brain trust of the Research Division.
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
2025 to 2026 Awarded Fellowships
We’ve just concluded our fellowship review season, and it’s been a roller-coaster ride. The good news is that we received over 500 applications this year for our three categories of support (long-term fellowships, short-term fellowships, and travel grants). This is a substantial increase over the 450 we received the previous year. Our applicant pool was also more diverse along a number of dimensions – more independent and unaffiliated scholars, more scholars working in newer fields from a wide array of disciplines, and more scholars from underrepresented groups. I am delighted to introduce the 2025-26 cohort of Huntington Fellows, which comprises 23 long-term fellows and 150 short-term fellows. They work on projects as varied as Maya forests in the early colonial period, contemporary Black American visions of outer space, early modern English women’s writing, the emergence of “brain science” in the early 20th century, and the circulation of Asian plants to Western U.S. botanical institutions in the 19th century.
On a more sober note, we learned in early April that the presidential administration was terminating our NEH grant, which had funded three long-term fellowships each year. At the same time, our partner in the inaugural Huntington-Cedars Sinai postdoctoral fellowship in the history of medicine closed its Program in the History of Medicine, thus terminating this fellowship as well. I am thankful that we were able to find internal resources to replace the NEH funds for 2025-26 and did not have to rescind our offers, as so many of our peer institutions were forced to do, but this is a one-time fix. Our current NEH grant was slated to run through 2028, and we do not have the means to replace these awards in subsequent years. We remain enormously grateful for all the support our community of Members, donors, and institutional partners have provided to the fellowship program over the years – now the largest of its kind in the United States, and (in the words of one NEH reviewer from our last renewal application) “one of the most prestigious and important programs in the humanities in the country.”
Architectural rendering of Scholars Grove. Image: VTBS Architects. | The Huntington.
Scholars Grove
It’s official! The City of San Marino has approved our application to build a residential housing complex at the northern edge of The Huntington for research fellows. This is the fulfillment of a decades-long dream to address the critical need for affordable housing for residential fellows. Thanks to an extraordinarily generous gift from longtime Huntington supporter, Charlie Munger, we are creating a living and learning community that includes 33 residential units and a commons area, the Wendy Munger commons, where fellows can gather for food, sociability, and conversation.
Current Fellows
Our twenty-three current Long-Term Fellows continue to dive into the collections. In addition to meeting weekly to circulate scholarly works in progress, this group has also been experimenting with different forms of research-related writing. Fellows Megan Kate Nelson and Devoney Looser lead a biweekly narrative non-fiction workshop, which has even featured a seminar on adapting research to television or film.
Screenwriter Lindy Vega discusses writing a pitch document.
Even from within the haven of research leave, the fellows all continue to be active speakers and publishers. Here are just a few examples of their numerous activities in recent months:
- Nayan Shah and Patricia J. Yu drew us into the “multiverse” of the recent Raqib Shaw exhibition in a post for Verso, The Huntington’s blog.
- Dominique Polanco explored new approaches to honoring indigenous histories in a talk for the ACMRS RaceB4Race group.
- Devoney Looser explained to CNN readers what is so captivating about Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice twenty years on.
- Edan Lepucki interviewed powerhouse fantasy novelist Leigh Bardugo about her evolution from YA to adult fiction.
Winter Events
In the opening months of 2025, the Research Division hosted five public lectures, including presentations by Distinguished Fellows Susan Scott Parrish and Susan D. Amussen. Paul Reeves delivered the inaugural Huntington Lecture in Mormon Studies and Anna Pegler-Gordon brought to light FBI case files documenting Japanese Americans’ defiance against World War II curfew restrictions. Kelly Lytle Hernández traced the US’s development of a whites-only immigration regime, a talk that concluded with a powerful reminder about the importance of research writ large—about the historian’s role in “taking [the] machine apart and laying its parts bare in front of us.’”
Research also hosted a conference on music in the early Spanish Americas, which brought together scholars of art history and musicology for a conversation tied closely to The Huntington’s rare books and gardens, as well as a conference on how nineteenth-century artists were inspired by geological discoveries.
Upcoming Events
The end of our academic year is packed with even more events—we hope to see you soon!
Conferences
- May 16–17, 2025
The South Sea Company and the Atlantic Slave Trade
Conveners: Nicholas Radburn (Lancaster University), Daniel Domingues da Silva (Rice University) - May 30–31, 2025
The Americas’ Civil War Era: Diverse Histories
Conveners: Christopher Clark (University of Connecticut), Verónica Castillo-Muñoz (UC Santa Barbara)
Lectures
- May 14, 2025
Shapiro Book Prize Lecture
“Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson”
Ashley Brown (University of Wisconsin-Madison) - May 27, 2025
Alliance & Collectivity: Retracing the Vibrant History of Asian American Artistic Communities in Interwar California
ShiPu Wang (UC Merced)