Recorded Programs: Nov. 5–19, 2020

Joseph Basil Girard, Landscape with Trees, Oct. 15, 1890, watercolor on paper, 5 x 3 1/2 in. (12.7 x 8.9 cm.), purchased with funds from the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Home to gorgeous gardens, spectacular art, and stunning rare books and manuscripts, The Huntington also offers an impressive slate of programs on topics and themes related to its collections. Below are video recordings of four recent online events.

Ecologies of Paper in the Early Modern World (Nov. 5, 2020)

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 (watch here).

Stephanie Jones-Rogers, associate professor of history at University of California, Berkeley. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Jones-Rogers.

Mistresses of the Market: White Women and the 19th-Century Domestic Slave Trade (Nov. 11, 2020)

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. (watch here).

Namwali Serpell, professor of literature at Harvard University. Photo courtesy of Namwali Serpell. Credit: Yanina Gotsulsky.

Black Matter (Nov. 18, 2020)

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

Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (Scribner, 2020), by Amy Stanley, professor of history at Northwestern University. Cover image courtesy of the publisher.

Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Woman's Life in 19th-Century Japan (Nov. 19, 2020)

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 (watch here).

Kevin Durkin is the editor of Verso and the managing editor in the Office of Communications and Marketing at The Huntington.