Watch, Read, Listen

Sonya Posmentier, associate professor of English at New York University, invites audience members to consider Civil Rights Movement activism as instances of both civic and poetic education.

We often think of learning to read poetry as something that happens through classroom lectures and textbooks. Instead, a parallel pedagogy was unfolding during the Mississippi summer project of 1964. In this lecture, Posmentier offers a glimpse of education that centers Black traditions of poetry, song and folklore; Black interpretive strategies; and Black alternative teaching practices in the context of fierce battles over who gets to learn, how, and where.

This is the Ridge lecture and is part of The Huntington Research 2025–2026 “Active in the Archive” lecture series.

Join Helen Thompson, Northwestern University Professor of English and The Huntington’s Dibner Distinguished Fellow in the History of Science & Technology, for a lecture on Jane Austen’s commentary on cosmetics.

How does the history of science help us interpret Jane Austen? How do Austen’s marriage plots, balls, and carriage rides relate to the domain of flasks, distillation apparatus, and laboratory techniques? This talk explores the fascinating practice of cosmetic chemistry in early modern England. By examining recipes for make-up and exposés of the women who used them to fake both beauty and virtue, Helen Thompson shows how women’s illicit chemical and sexual knowledge traveled through literary history to shape the meaning and narrative form of Austen’s novel Persuasion. 

This is the Dibner Distinguished Fellow lecture and is part of The Huntington Research 2025-2026 “Active in the Archive” lecture series.