Videos and Recorded Programs

Author and sculptor Matthew Spender talks about the friendship between his father, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, from the late 1920s until Auden and Isherwood emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. He focuses on the intense relationships between these three British writers, their homeland, and Nazi Germany. This talk is part of the Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture Series at The Huntington.

Early modern collections played a key role in the creation and transmission of knowledge, but they are usually studied in terms of the objects they contained or how they came to exist. This conference instead explores how they were actually used in the 16th and 17th centuries. The conference was held at The Huntington Sept. 15–16, 2017.

Richard Pegg, Asian art curator of the private MacLean Collection in Chicago, discusses the similarities and differences in representations of space, both real and imagined, in early modern maps created in China, Korea, and Japan. He also examines the introduction of European map-making techniques into Asian cartographic traditions.

Based on the acclaimed science fiction novel Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, a new graphic adaptation by Damian Duffy and illustrator John Jennings gives fresh form to Butler’s powerful tale of slavery, time travel, and the inexorable pull of the past. Duffy and Jennings discuss the continuing relevance of Butler’s writings and how it has influenced their own work.

Inspired by the award-winning speculative fiction author Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006), leading experts in the field will explore the expansive ways Butler’s writing, research, and life foster deeper understanding of the past, present, and possible futures.

The exhibition “Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories” examines the life and work of celebrated author Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), the first science fiction writer to receive a prestigious MacArthur “genius” award and the first African American woman to win widespread recognition writing in that genre.

The Los Angeles Service Academy provides an intensive introduction to the infrastructure and institutions of greater Los Angeles for high school juniors. The Huntington documented LASA’s investigation of the Los Angeles River and the Port of Los Angeles.

Jennifer van Saders, Carnegie-Princeton Fellow, discusses how the technique of astroseismology has revolutionized scientists’ view of the internal workings of stars.