Watch, Read, Listen

Amy Stanley, professor of history at Northwestern University, introduces the vibrant social and cultural life of early nineteenth-century Japan through the story of an irrepressible woman named Tsuneno, who defied convention to make a life for herself in the big city of Edo (now Tokyo) in the decades before the arrival of Commodore Perry and the fall of the shogunate.

Namwali Serpell, professor of literature at Harvard, author of The Old Drift, and recent recipient of the Arthur C. Clarke award for the best science fiction novel published in the UK discusses the origins of Afrofuturism. This is the Ridge Lecture for Literature.

Stephanie Jones-Rogers, associate professor of history at University of California, Berkeley, draws upon the testimony of formerly enslaved individuals, the correspondence and account books of slave traders, and a wide range of other material (including travel writing, newspapers and business directories) to show the myriad ways in which white, primarily married, women actively participated in the South’s slave market economy, which involved the buying, selling, and hiring of enslaved people. This program is the 2020 Nevins Lecture.

This conference explores the transmutation, preservation, and loss of paper as a cycle of archiving and forgetting that defined early modern artistic practice, economic transaction, and political statecraft. Speakers map paper’s various guises, its ability to retain meanings associated with its material origins as well as its desire to conceal its former states or to encourage belief in a value beyond its material reality. Charting the journeys of early modern paper in drawing, print, and document, this program not only restructures our understanding of paper’s importance in early modern artistic practice and political life but also reconstructs the governing roles of environment, place, and origin in modes of making and address.

Discover the eerier side of The Huntington in a virtual event where curators and botanists share rarely seen objects and otherworldly stories from deep inside the collections. Enter a mysterious world of ghoulish characters, bizarre plants, and devilish elixirs and treats you can make at home.

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