Watch, Read, Listen

Amy McNair, professor of Chinese art at the University of Kansas, explores the calligraphy found in the Lingering Garden in Suzhou, a famous setting for two outdoor formats of calligraphy. Plaques written by friends of the owner identify places and views within the garden, while engraved stone slabs display the owner’s collection of antique calligraphy examples.

Nothing generated interest, imitation, and outrage throughout Europe better and more lastingly than Giambattista Guarini’s Pastor Fido. In this talk, Eileen Reeves, professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, discusses allusions to the controversies emerging from that frothy and scandalous tragicomedy of 1589 in the astronomical works of Italy’s other most famous citizen, Galileo Galilei.

This is the Dibner Distinguished Fellow Lecture.

Hilary Mantel, whose literary archive is held at The Huntington, is one of the most critically acclaimed authors working today. Her unprecedented double Booker Prize wins for Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies combined with sell-out West End and Broadway stage adaptations and award-winning television dramatizations brought her unquestionable public prominence. But Mantel’s Tudor novels constitute only one element of a writing career, which has spanned nearly 34 years, troubled myriad genres, and explored multiple forms. “Reading and Re-Reading Hilary Mantel” constitutes the first international conference on Mantel’s work and seeks to act as a “state of the field” event, bringing a diverse range of Mantel scholars together to consider the complex presences and resonances of Mantel’s work in the 21st century.

Jesse Alemán, professor of English at the University of New Mexico, discusses the lives and letters of the Jimeno brothers, whose coming of age in the years before the U.S. Civil War demonstrates that the process of becoming Latino in the United States is a story of uneven assimilation, embattled acculturation, and divided loyalties to family, nation, language, and place.

This is the 2021 Ray Allen Billington Lecture in the History of the American West.