Watch, Read, Listen

James P. Folsom, the Telleen/Jorgenson Director of the Botanical Gardens at The Huntington, shares insights into a lifetime spent exploring the intersections of botany, art, literature, and history. For more than three decades, Folsom has overseen The Huntington’s extensive botanical collections, showcased in 18 thematic gardens spread over 130 public acres. He has dedicated much of his effort to programming that increases public interest in and understanding of the science, culture, and history of plants and gardens. Earlier this year he was honored by the American Horticultural Society with its Liberty Hyde Bailey Award, the organization’s highest honor.

After a brief presentation, Folsom joins Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence in conversation before taking questions from virtual attendees around the world. This will be one of Folsom’s last public appearances as director of the gardens before he retires at the end of the year. Don’t miss this compelling conversation.

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.