News From the Director of Research—October 2025

Over the next few weeks, the new cohort of Long-Term Fellows will be settling in for a year of research, writing, and scholarly sociability. It’s a remarkably diverse cohort, with scholars working on topics as varied as Pacific Islander poetry, Mayan forests, a Filipina food scientist, Spanish maps stolen by English pirates, colonial Mexican money, and early modern English botanical studies.

We are excited to see how these projects unfold in conversation with our world-class collections and especially delighted to host so many scholars working on the new(ish) field of plant humanities. Craig Santos Perez (R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow), Sandy Rodriguez (Hannah & Russell Kully Distinguished Fellow in American Art), Scott Doebler (Dibner Fellow), Kat Lecky (Mellon Fellow), Wendy Cheng (Simon and June Li Fellow), and Lindsay Wells (Kemble Fellow) are all exploring the relationship between plants and humans through the lens of art, history, literature, and art history. We can’t wait for them to get to know our Herbarium and Botanical collections, along with our terrific History of Science collections in the Library!

Three people stand in a courtyard with chairs and string lights. — Research fellows Liza Blake, Sandy Rodriguez, and Craig Santos Perez attend the 2025 welcome dinner.

I am beyond grateful to announce that we will be able to replace two of the three NEH long-term fellowships lost through the termination of The Huntington’s NEH grant, thanks to the generosity of donors Simon and June Li, and Heather and Paul Haaga. The Li and Haaga families have provided funds to support one fellow each for the next four years, with additional support from Simon and June to fund the rigorous peer review process that brings 20 senior scholars each winter to The Huntington to read and evaluate the 500 applications we receive. We are following closely the lawsuit filed in April by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Languages Association challenging the legality of the termination.

Check out the special edition on exhibitions in London by leading art historians published in the Huntington Library Quarterly this summer! The issue has already made a splash, garnering praise from the Yale Center for British Art, the Winterthur, and the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art.