RESEARCH NEWS | JANUARY 2026

This has been a busy fall for the Research Division. We welcomed a new cohort of 23 Long-Term Fellows, including Feier Ying, our inaugural June and Simon K.C. Li Fellow in East Asian Garden Studies, and Cristiano Zanetti, our first Eleanor Searle Postdoctoral Instructor in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Caltech and The Huntington.

We also hosted three public lectures under this year’s theme, “Active in the Archives,” and one conference, “Historias Radicales: Latinx Identity and History in Southern California.” This event brought together artists, educators, curators, and scholars to discuss the history of Chicano art and activism in the Los Angeles area in conjunction with the new exhibition “Radical Histories: Chicano Prints from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.” An audience of 200 people learned about the long history of community activism in Southern California and the creative marriage of art and politics within the Chicano community.

Four people sit behind a table on a stage in front of a projector screen. — Panelists on stage in Rothenberg Hall at Historias Radicales: Latinx Identity and History in Southern California. Photo by Linnea Stephan. | The Huntington, San Marino, California.

Our fellowship application portal for 2026–27 closed on November 15. After some trepidation about potential declines in the number of international scholars applying given the new immigration restrictions, I’m happy to report that we’ve received about the same percentage of applications from abroad as usual: roughly 30% of our short-term applicants and 25% of our long-term applicants hail from countries outside the United States. Bringing international and U.S. scholars together to share their ideas and research is one of the most valuable aspects of The Huntington’s fellowship program, fostering a truly global scholarly community. Our Library and Art Museum hold deep collections documenting the history, literature, and art of Latin America, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Rim, in particular, and are an important hub for scholarly conversations in these fields.

At the November off-site Board of Governors retreat, three current and former fellows joined me and Ken McCormick for a roundtable discussion of the challenges AI poses for research in the Humanities. We had a spirited conversation about the opportunities and pitfalls of this new technology. Karen Harvey, this year’s Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow, shared some of the preliminary results from her ongoing project digitizing and analyzing a large corpus of 18th-century letters from British men and women. Harvey tested several transcription programs aimed at turning manuscript writing into printed text, with very mixed results! Jen Jahner, Professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Students at Caltech and a former Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow, gave a brief overview of how AI has developed over the years and its basic analytic structure, while Peter Mancall, Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute and former Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow, shared his concerns about AI’s harmful environmental impact and theft of intellectual property.