A Haven for the Humanities

At dawn, The Huntington is still—a hush over its 207 acres in San Marino. Inside the Library’s historic core, each archival box holds traces of the past—from the mundane to the extraordinary: a note in the margin, a map of conquest, a letter of resistance. 

By midmorning, that stillness becomes quiet work. In the Library’s reading rooms, the art galleries, and the Botanical Gardens, ideas cross centuries and disciplines. What begins as scholarship becomes something larger: a way of asking how we live with the past and what responsibilities come with knowing it. 

Throughout the day, the humanities come alive—not as fields under pressure, but as a practice of attention. To read a letter, trace a pigment, or map a migration is to study how meaning moves through ordinary lives. At The Huntington, that quiet work continues, a reminder that the humanities are not only about preservation but participation—an active conversation between history and the world we inhabit now. 

Morning in the Reading Room 

Scott Doebler opens a slim volume bound in red leather—a 1545 letter by Bartolomé de las Casas. The Dominican friar, one of the most famous and conflicted figures of the 16th century, warns that Spanish demands for tribute and forced labor in Yucatán and Guatemala will spark rebellion. “He was right,” Doebler says. “The Maya rose up a year later.” The paper, yellowed but sturdy, bears the friar’s tight, abbreviated script—s’s curling like sixes, n’s dropped entirely. Around it, the scent of soap from freshly washed hands mingles with the climate-controlled air of the room.  

Doebler, a Dibner Research Fellow in the History of Science & Technology and assistant professor at the University of Wyoming, is writing an environmental history of the Maya and their tropical forest world between 1517 and 1717. Working in Spanish, English, and two Mayan languages—Yucatec and Chontal—he reconstructs what he calls “more-than-human communities,” places where people, plants, and animals co-created systems of survival. His project, Lure of the Lowlands, draws on The Huntington’s rare books on Yucatán and Guatemala, English-Caribbean maritime records, and materials from the Botanical collections that document tropical forests.  

A favorite discovery came in a 16th-century chronicle by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, whose sketch shows conquistadors strapping their horses to two canoes to cross a crocodile-filled river—a moment, Doebler says, “when the environment itself pushed back.” Such images invert the familiar tale of conquest, revealing how forests resisted and helped the Maya remain independent.  

Doebler sees a modern echo in that story. “We’re living in a moment when tropical forests are being cleared all over the world,” he says. “People still assume prosperity and forests can’t coexist. History shows they can.”  

“One of the coolest things about The Huntington,” he added, “is that it’s a more-than-human community—people, art, plants, hummingbirds—all part of a shared ecosystem of care. Maybe The Huntington is a microcosm of how we might think about history.” 

Late Morning in Special Collections 

Doebler’s study of forest resilience finds a counterpart in Wendy Cheng’s research on plant migration—how living collections embody layered histories of beauty, displacement, and care. By late morning Cheng, the Simon and June Li Fellow, lifts a folder from the archive and studies a page covered in looping script. The handwriting wavers, part record-keeping, part devotion. A professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, she is writing a book of essays on plant migration and human–plant relations—an inquiry into how “our everyday experiences and perspectives shift if we pay more attention to plant life, and see plants as living histories—Indigenous, immigrant, local—that have been heavily shaped by humans but also have their own stories to tell.” 

Working across archives, living collections, and gardens, Cheng traces how beauty and plunder travel together. “Like humans, plants have been displaced and exploited, their ecosystems compromised, destroyed, or transformed by capitalist and colonial systems,” she says. “Beauty is complicated—it can be possessive and exploitative, too—but at its core, my focus on beauty is about the kind of life-affirming joy that interacting with and learning from plants provides for so many people, even in the worst of circumstances.” 

Her project focuses in part on camellias—plants that “embody hundreds of years of history between East Asia and the West.” They traveled the same imperial routes as tea, she notes, but “the stories of each set of human hands that cared for them, shaped them, loved them, have come to have their own lives and logics.” Los Angeles, she adds, is “an important place in global camellia history.” 

Among The Huntington’s holdings that Cheng studies are the William Hertrich papers, the Ralph Peer correspondence archive, and the Japanese Garden file. The plant accession records and the living camellia collections, especially along the North Vista and Camellia Garden Walk, allow her to compare the archive against what still grows. Her favorite specimen is the Camellia japonica ‘California’, reportedly the oldest camellia plant in Southern California. “It arrived from Japan in 1888 and once lived on the Hollywood Hills estate of music producer Ralph Peer,” she says. “This plant embodies one strand of Southern California camellia history and the wealthy individuals who stewarded them amidst a variety of circumstances.” 

For Cheng, the boundary between garden and archive is porous; each leaf—whether paper or plant—preserves traces of human touch and time. 

“The smell of the old paper—reminding us that paper, too, comes from plants—stays on your fingers,” she notes. “The beautiful cursive handwriting in ink reminds me that the person who wrote it touched that paper with their pen. It’s like time travel.” 

That sense of continuity carries outdoors. One morning, Cheng paused beneath redwoods and oaks in the North Vista as the season’s first blooms appeared—Camellia sasanqua ‘Chojiguruma,’ or “Wheel of Anemone.”  

“Looking at the flowers as the morning sunshine came through the tree canopy and an Anna’s hummingbird hovered to sip from them,” she recalls, “I could begin to imagine what it felt like for camellia lovers hundreds of years ago to encounter wild camellias in the forests of East Asia—and then I really appreciated the intentions, knowledge, and constant labor and care it took for the botanical curators and gardeners to bring all of these elements together and enable me to feel this way.” 

Cheng’s work extends beyond The Huntington’s archives and gardens. She also collaborates with the family of Japanese immigrant grower F. M. Uyematsu, whose camellias—sold under duress during the World War II mass incarceration of Japanese Americans—became the basis of Descanso Gardens’ collection.  With horticultural staff there and at The Huntington, Cheng shares that layered history with the public. “Being able to walk among and observe so many of the plants I’m studying every day is a dreamy research set-up,” she says. “The knowledge and expertise of Huntington curators and staff on both the botanical and research sides have been absolutely invaluable.” 

As she leaves the archives and steps back into the camellia grove, sunlight threads through the canopy—another day of research rooted in the ground she studies. 

Afternoon: From Studio to the Scott Galleries 

As daylight shifts, the focus turns from research to creation. What Cheng traces across archives and gardens, Sandy Rodriguez transforms through pigment and paper—turning materials of nature and history into maps of memory and resistance. 

In her Los Angeles studio, Sandy Rodriguez grinds cochineal and other natural pigments, paints on amate paper (once outlawed by Spanish authorities to suppress Indigenous record-keeping), and develops maps and codices that fuse ecological data with the politics of territory. The works are made in the studio—then installed at The Huntington, where the artist’s research across its three collections informs what ultimately hangs in the galleries.  

Rodriguez, the Hannah & Russel Kully Distinguished Fellow in the History of American Art, is developing “Palimpsest of Power: Art, Cartography, and the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands,” a research project drawing on the Library’s historic maps and scientific treatises, the Botanical collections, and works from the Art Museum. The resulting installation—“Sandy Rodriguez: Book 13”—opens March 22, 2026, and runs through April 27, 2027, in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art, as part of the American galleries reinstallation. The installation will include monumental works on amate paper, including a map of the southern United States, native plant portraits, landscapes, and an artist book shaped by contemporary headlines and the U.S.-Mexico boundary survey in the archives. 

Rodriguez first worked on site as a 2020–21 Caltech–Huntington Art + Research Fellow, creating pieces for Borderlands, a project begun in 2021 to widen the narrative of American art. Among the works is Rodriguez-Mondragón’s Federal Indian Boarding Schools Map of the South Western United States and Child Migrant Detention Centers (2022), a hand-processed watercolor on amate based on an 1864 railroad map and U.S. border survey from the Library’s holdings; orange and violet markers plot nineteenth-century boarding schools and contemporary child migrant detention centers—displaying visual evidence across centuries of displacement. 

Another recent work, YOU ARE HERE, maps Los Angeles across time, layering topography, languages, land use, native plants and animals, and references to uprisings and epidemics. It invites viewers to locate personal histories within a multilingual cartography of place.  

“The importance of artists engaging with The Huntington’s collections and scholarly communities is more critical than ever,” Rodriguez says. “In an era when voices are systematically erased and silenced—and as our communities and universities come under siege—it is up to artists, writers, and scholars to create work that reflects these challenging times, grounded in factual history and rigorous research.” 

As afternoon turns to evening, research ideas move from studio to stage, entering public life. 

Evening in Rothenberg Hall 

By dusk, a sold-out audience fills Rothenberg Hall to hear Catherine Ceniza Choy, the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow. She steps to the podium for her public lecture, “Inventor of Magic Food: The Life and Legacy of Filipina Food Scientist Maria Ylagan Orosa.” 

Orosa—a chemist, humanitarian, and wartime hero—invented banana ketchup and a vitamin-rich flour that saved prisoners in camps during World War II. Choy, professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Asian American Histories of the United States (Beacon, 2022), is at work on a biography of Orosa, tracing her letters, laboratory notes, and family papers through Filipino and American archives. During her lecture, she emphasized the genre’s power: “We need more biographies. They can give a multidimensional sense of individual lives.” 

At The Huntington, Choy’s research has centered on three key holdings: the George William Beattie and Helen Pruitt Beattie papers (1853–1944), which include photographs of the Philippine Islands; rare books such as Trumbull White’s Our New Possessions (1898), a U.S. colonial survey of its “new” territories; and Bulletins of the Bureau of Education in the Philippines from the early 1900s. These sources frame Orosa’s scientific career within the transformation of education and food production under American rule. 

Among the images Choy has studied is a photograph from the Beattie papers titled Open Court in Normal School Dormitory. It shows young Filipina students taking tea in an open-air courtyard lush with hanging and potted plants, their Filipiniana garment sleeves edged with translucent piña cloth woven from pineapple fiber. For Choy, the image captures the convergence of women’s education, botany, and colonial modernity—an environment that helped shape Orosa’s conviction that science could be an instrument of survival and service. “The breadth of her work with plants in order to achieve Philippine self-sufficiency, her humanitarian efforts to address malnutrition, and, of course, her most famous invention of the beloved condiment, banana ketchup, deserve our attention,” Choy says. 

In addition, Choy has begun examining The Huntington’s newly digitized Collection of Photographic Postcards and Travel Ephemera of the Philippines, ca. 1900–1950, particularly the subseries on “Provinces and cities,” “People and activities,” and “Travel ephemera.” These visual records extend her understanding of the landscapes and communities that informed Orosa’s work and enrich The Huntington’s growing Filipino and Pacific Rim collections. The Huntington also houses a significant collection of U.S.–Philippine history, including the papers of Emilio Aguinaldo, the first president of the Philippines.  

Reflecting on her fellowship, Choy notes the space The Huntington provides for sustained, cross-disciplinary study. “The fellowship has provided time and resources—archival, bibliographic, and botanical—for me to think about the intersections among the histories of plants, food science, and U.S. colonialism, especially Americanized education, in the Philippines,” she says. 

These archival threads fed directly into her Oct. 15 lecture, which also draws on images of Orosa’s master’s thesis, excerpts from her writings, and contemporary photographs of Filipino markets in Pasadena. Choy observes that Orosa’s legacy endures in kitchens as much as in archives: bottles of banana ketchup on grocery shelves, recipes shared across the diaspora—a continuing taste of ingenuity and belonging. 

Behind her, images from Orosa’s life and work fill the screen—kitchen tables turned laboratories, notebooks layered with formulas and recipes. 
 
Choy notes that Orosa’s legacy continues to inspire new forms of collaboration between science, culture, and the humanities. In the spring of 2026, The Huntington’s Kitchen Garden will debut a Maria Orosa–inspired planting that highlights the foods and plants central to her research in both lab and kitchen. The garden will anchor a public program on April 19, 2026, inviting visitors to engage with Orosa’s philosophy by touching, smelling, and tasting the fruits of her labor. 

Turning back to the audience, Choy ends her talk with gratitude: “Mabuhay The Huntington and all of you and your support for the humanities.” Mabuhay—a Filipino expression meaning “long live” or “may you live well”—sends the room into applause, a fitting close to the day: cultural research leaving the archive and reentering the world. 
 
Outside Rothenberg Hall, the national picture shifts: the humanities face a harsher climate. 

A Haven in a Hostile Climate 

“The humanities have always weathered cycles of contraction and renewal, although the headwinds feel stronger than ever at this historical moment,” says Karen R. Lawrence, president of The Huntington. “We can’t control the storm, but we can build structures that protect ideas.” 

Across the country, graduate programs are being scaled back or pausing admissions—recently at Boston University (English, history, philosophy) for 2025–26 and at the University of Chicago (most arts & humanities Ph.D. programs) for 2026–27.  National data shows a 15-year downward slide in humanities degrees and faculty hiring reduced to historic lows. The share of tenure-line jobs has fallen to about one-third of the professoriate.  

The National Council on the Humanities—an advisory group of scholars and private citizens that counsels the National Endowment for the Humanities on grants and policy—also underwent abrupt change this fall when the White House dismissed its members, according to the New York Times.  

In contrast, the reading rooms at The Huntington are full. 

Each year, The Huntington supports roughly 150 research fellows drawn from a pool of thousands of applicants—and welcomes more than 2,000 additional readers annually who conduct independent research in its collections. The Huntington has supported more than 12,000 scholars since the program’s founding in 1928. In a moment when university resources shrink and public funding wanes, these fellowships form one of the largest and longest-running centers for humanistic research in the nation. 

Research fellowships range in length, including short residencies of one to three months, specialized variable-term appointments, and roughly two dozen long-term awards for 10 to 12 months. 

A new residential complex, Scholars Grove, now under construction near historic avocado trees, is scheduled to open in 2027. When complete, its 33 townhouses will give research fellows a place to live and work side by side, deepening the sense of scholarly community that forms around shared research and daily life—and addressing the persistent challenge of housing scholars in one of the most expensive and sprawling cities in the U.S. 

Susan Juster, the W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, has seen scholarly trends shift subtly but significantly. “The biggest growth has been in environmental and plant humanities, in visual culture, and in California history,” she says. “We’ve also seen an uptick in independent scholars and contingent faculty applying for our fellowships. The academy can’t contain all the scholarship happening today.” 

Under her tenure, The Huntington has expanded its fellowships to include artists and independent researchers, affirming that humanistic inquiry belongs to anyone engaged in the pursuit of meaning. “You don’t need a university appointment for these collections to belong to you,” she adds. 

The Huntington now offers awards specifically for those outside traditional academia, including the Alan Jutzi Residential Fellowship for Non-Traditional Scholars, the Elizabeth B. Motika Fellowship in Architectural History, and the Thomas W. Wilkins Fellowship. 

Each research fellow also shapes the others. 

Artists and independent scholars, Juster adds, bring new perspectives that help others see the archives differently. 

“We’re big enough to support traditional scholars,” she says, “but flexible enough to include people working in other modes. That diversity makes the conversations deeper and richer.” 

She adds, “Doing archival research makes you a better thinker. It’s one of the few things that teaches patience and humility.” 

In April 2025, the cancellation of several National Endowment for the Humanities grants reduced external support at The Huntington by about $350,000—funding that would have covered multiple fellowships over three years. Donors Heather and Paul G. Haaga Jr., and June and Simon Li, quickly stepped in to sustain most of those opportunities, underscoring the strength of the partnerships that keep The Huntington’s research mission moving forward. 

The Scholar-President 

When Karen R. Lawrence became president of The Huntington in 2018, she brought decades of experience as a scholar, teacher, and institutional leader. A James Joyce specialist, former president of Sarah Lawrence College, and former dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Humanities, Lawrence saw The Huntington’s future not as expansion but as integration. Her phrase, “One Huntington,” captures the idea that its three collections—Library, Art, and Botanical Gardens—each formidable on their own, are even more powerful together. 

“As a Joyce scholar, I’ve always been interested in narrative—how we draw connections to tell different stories and rely on different forms to tell them in different ways. In many ways, that’s what The Huntington does. Our three collections give scholars the materials for discovery and new storytelling,” she says.  

Her tenure has coincided with a period of change for the humanities nationally, but she views those pressures as an opportunity to reaffirm The Huntington’s public mission.  

Lawrence has worked to position The Huntington as both a research institution and a civic forum—a place where scholarship and public life meet. Under her leadership, The Huntington launched the Why It Matters conversation series, which brings cultural leaders and thinkers into public dialogue on the role of the humanities. It most recently featured the visionary filmmaker, Ava DuVernay. Lawrence has advanced the modernization of the historic Library building through the Library/Art Building Project (“the LAB” project), ensuring future accessibility and reflecting the institution’s “One Huntington” integration across collections. She has also championed the acquisition of major literary archives, including Thomas Pynchon, as well as masterpieces in the art collection by Thomas Cole, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, and Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, enabled through a partnership with The Ahmanson Foundation. 

Together, these efforts reflect Lawrence’s belief that the future of the humanities lies not only in connection—between disciplines and between scholars and the public—but in continued investment: in the people, spaces, and resources that make that connection possible. 

After the Fellowship: What Endures 

Years later, the impact of these fellowships comes into view.  

The long-term impact of a fellowship rarely appears immediately; books, exhibitions, and collaborations often surface years later. Since 1995, more than two hundred books by Huntington fellows have entered the world — a measurable record of sustained scholarship. Highlights among them include: 

• Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. A landmark study of how enslaved Virginians leveraged the War of 1812, the book won the Pulitzer Prize in History and was a National Book Award finalist, evidence that archival work here resonates beyond the academy.
• Marjoleine Kars, Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast. Reconstructing the 1763 slave rebellion in Dutch Berbice from neglected colonial records, Kars’s book won the Cundill History Prize and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and drew mainstream acclaim as a richly detailed reframing of the Age of Revolution in the Americas.
• Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. A widely taught intervention in literary and cultural theory, this study received the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize and helped shape the critical vocabulary used to read contemporary culture.
• Natalia Molina, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community. A community history of Echo Park told through a family restaurant, the book was recognized as a James Beard Award finalist (History) and widely cited as essential Los Angeles reading. 
   

Kevin Dawson — Recovering the Aquatic Archive  

On an overcast afternoon in Oakland, children pushed canoes off the dock at the city’s estuary, their paddles catching light on the water. Nearby, historian Kevin Dawson laid out reproductions of 17th-century prints—African swimmers and divers rendered by European hands—as students discussed what those images meant for how they saw themselves. It was a scene that captured Dawson’s purpose: returning history to the communities that made it.  

Dawson, an associate professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California, Merced, was the 2022–23 Kemble Fellow in Maritime History at The Huntington. His research—spanning early modern travel narratives and illustrated treatises—revealed how African and Afro-Atlantic peoples forged complex aquatic cultures, mastering swimming, diving, navigation, and water-based healing long before European observers recorded them. The work culminated in “Black Aquatics: Early Modern Past, Present, and Future,” forthcoming in Huntington Library Quarterly with co-author Amanda Herbert, an associate professor of early modern Americas in the history department at Durham University.  

For Dawson, The Huntington had long been a place of discovery. “Setting myself adrift in The Huntington’s rare books and manuscripts collections always results in unexpected and invaluable finds,” he reflected, “while connections made with scholars working across the humanities and at universities around the world continually produce new lines of inquiry.”  

A substantial part of his scholarship—including his award-winning article “Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World” (2006), published from research begun during his first Huntington fellowship as a graduate student—grew from time spent in its reading rooms.  

At The Huntington, Dawson explored maritime materials in the archives, such as Awnsham and John Churchill’s Collection of Voyages (1732), Johann Moritz Rugendas’s Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil (1835), and John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796).  

Together with Herbert, Dawson carried that archival immersion into public life. Their project Open Water: Histories of Afroaquatics, supported by Durham University, UC Merced, and the Oakland youth organization We Lead Ours, used early modern sources to address a modern crisis: disproportionately high drowning rates in Black communities in the United States and England. Through hands-on workshops, visual art, and puzzle-based learning, Open Water invites young people and their families to reclaim a lineage of skill and belonging. In 2024, the program was recognized by the United States Rowing Association for advancing access and inclusion in aquatic sports.  

Dawson, author of Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and winner of the 2019 Harriet Tubman Prize from the Schomburg Center, viewed this continuum—from archive to waterway—as the humanities at their most vital. “History doesn’t just correct the past,” he says. “It can save lives.”  

Devoney Looser — Jane Austen, Reimagined 

In The Huntington’s reading room, Devoney Looser traced Jane Austen’s afterlives—on the page, the stage, and the screen. A Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, she came to The Huntington in 2024–25 as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow to work on The Stunning Gunnings, a group biography of two generations of 18th- and 19th-century women who turned their notoriety into art. 

Looser’s research often begins with the tangible: a pamphlet from the 1800 trial of Austen’s aunt, Jane Leigh Perrot; a volume of The Loiterer, the Oxford periodical edited by Austen’s brothers, where her writing may have appeared under the name “Sophia Sentiment”; and the imprint of her great-uncle, the London bookseller Stephen Austen, who published The Female Physician (1730), a guide to midwifery and women’s health. Each object in The Huntington’s Leigh family papers offers a clue to the networks that shaped Austen’s life and those who later claimed her. 

For Wild for Austen (St. Martin’s Press, 2025), released for the novelist’s 250th birthday, Looser drew on those same holdings to tell a livelier story—of thieves, abolitionists, and ghosts, but also of readers who made Austen their own. In the Porter family papers, she found early admirers recommending Emma in 1816 letters; in the archives of playwright Zoë Akins and novelist Kingsley Amis, she traced Austen’s migration to Hollywood and modern satire. Wallace Stevens’s signed Novels of Jane Austen sits only shelves away from Akins’s 1937 Pride and Prejudice screenplay—a juxtaposition that, for Looser, captures what she calls “the wildness of reception.” 

“Jane Austen didn’t write just for specialists,” Looser reminds her audiences. “Neither should we.” 

On Dec. 2, she will introduce a screening of the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Linking her archival discoveries to Austen’s enduring presence in popular culture, Looser turns scholarship outward—a historian of reading who invites the public to read alongside her.  

Alyssa Collins — Writing the Future Through the Archive 

 
In the quiet of The Huntington’s Ahmanson Reading Room, Alyssa Collins turned the pages of Octavia E. Butler’s notebooks and drafts—cells of thought replicating across decades. Here, in one of the Library’s most requested collections, she traced the author’s fascination with genetics, evolution, and what she called cellularity: the notion that survival itself can occur at the microscopic level.  

Collins, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at California State University, Northridge, served as The Huntington’s inaugural Octavia E. Butler Fellow in 2021–22. Her project, “Cellular Blackness: Octavia E. Butler’s Posthuman Ontologies,” examined Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy as a touchstone, exploring how the novelist wove science and spirit into visions of Black feminist endurance.  

Working through Butler’s drafts, notecards, and commonplace notebooks, Collins uncovered how the writer’s engagement with microbiology and genetics intersected with the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose cancer cells—taken without consent in 1951—became the immortal HeLa line. In Butler’s speculative worlds, Collins found a reimagining of that legacy, anchored in Butler’s consistent foregrounding of embodied narratives of Black women: cellular replication as a metaphor for collective survival and transformation.  

Her fellowship, Collins said, offered “time to think across history and imagination, grounded in the material traces of Butler’s own process.” It allowed her to read Butler not only as a novelist but, as she put it, “a theorist and archivist of the future.”  

In an interview for The Huntington’s scholarly blog, Verso, she said, “I don’t think you ever really expect to enter someone’s archive and have them continually surprise you, especially with all the research we do as scholars. However, I can say that even though I started out knowing Butler as an incredible writer and scholar, every day I spend in her archive only increases my esteem for her.”

“My time as a fellow was exciting not only because of the work I was able to initiate and expand, but also because of the scholarly community that I was able to experience. Several fellows in my cohort offered invaluable advice and support, and I have relationships from that time that continue to this day,” she says. “My growing experience with the archive and the continued opportunity to share Butler’s work with my students, colleagues, and the community have been truly amazing, and the relationships built along the way have been equally as special.”

Last Light 

The lamps in the Ahmanson Reading Room go dark one by one.  

Beyond the gates, debate over the value of the humanities continues. Inside, the work endures. 

“The humanities are civic infrastructure,” Lawrence says. “They’re the systems of thought and imagination that hold a community together. They help us see how we got here—and how we might build a more connected society. There has never been a more important time to invest in them.”