Videos and Recorded Programs

The Ridge Lecture in Literature featuring Ato Quayson
Ato Quayson, the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English at Stanford, discusses James Joyce’s use of physical space in Ulysses. Joyce’s Ulysses situates Leopold Bloom’s perambulations as the conduit for thinking about semi-imperial Dublin in the early 20th century. They also raise implications about the complex configurations of space and temporality in...

A 322-year-old house from Marugame, Japan is being added to the Japanese Garden. This well-preserved structure is an exquisite example of a working magistrate’s residence that once served as the center of village life and home to generations of the same family.

Edward Kamens, professor of Japanese Studies at Yale University, considers the aesthetics of viewing and reading early modern Japanese calligraphy albums—tekagami—in which fragmentary samples of writing by notable writers are brought together for appreciation and display. Focus will be placed on the content of a tekagami in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Sandy Rodriguez’s YOU ARE HERE / Tovaangar / El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula / Los Angeles is a multilingual map of the greater Los Angeles area, representing the topography, language, flora, fauna, and land stewardship in the region over time and illustrating the movement and histories of peoples who have called—and continue to call—the area home.

This work is...

Peter Sturman, professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, discusses the artistic polymath Xu Wei (1521–1593) and his uninhibited style of calligraphy, known as kuangcao, or “wild cursive.” Sturman introduces Xu’s calligraphy—particularly, three scrolls that Xu wrote in an increasingly drunken state during a garden gathering—within the context of the colorful history of that script, which has been associated with wine.

Mary Shelley likened the writing of her famous book to Victor Frankenstein’s making of his creature. In this lecture, James Chandler, professor at the University of Chicago and The Huntington’s R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow, explores Shelley’s “creature,” in what is now one of the most widely-read novels in the English-speaking world. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus inspired many offspring in the form of myriad...