Underrepresented Voices in the Archive

Huntington curators Dr. Linde B. Lehtinen, Dr. Karla Nielsen, and Li Wei Yang discuss and highlight the Library's African American, Asian American, Indigenous, and LGBTQ collections. Moderated by Dr. Natalia Molina, Interim, W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research.

Dr. Linde B. Lehtinen is responsible for the Library's vast photography collection of over 800,000 images. She received her B.A. in art history from the University of Chicago and M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the University of Wisconsin­Madison. She has worked for several museums, including The Getty, the Skirball Cultural Center, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where she co-curated the exhibition The Train: RFK's Last Journey. Lehtinen's research interests include Asian and Asian American photography, especially from the Philippines and its diaspora, photography of California and the West, and archives in contemporary art. She has published numerous articles and presents regularly on diverse topics ranging from histories of the photobook to decolonizing practices in photography. 

Dr. Karla Nielsen stewards the Library's archival and print holdings in literature, publishing, journalism, and the performing arts. Before joining The Huntington in 2018, Nielsen worked as curator of literature in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University, where she had an affiliate appointment in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. She obtained her doctorate in comparative literature (Spanish, Latin, Arabic) from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.S.L.I.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has worked as an editor for academic and small press publishers, experience that continues to inform her scholarly interests in publishing studies, the interrelatedness of literary form and material format, visual poetics, and the long history of the novel. At The Huntington, she curated the exhibition "Mapping Fiction" in 2022 and is currently preparing an exhibition on 19th-century climate change awareness for Pacific Standard Time 2024. 

Li Wei Yang has curated The Huntington's Pacific Rim collections since 2015. Prior to that, he was an assistant curator of Western American history and institutional archivist and a project archivist at the Library. Yang completed the M.Sc. in history at the University of Edinburgh and the M.L.I.S. at San Jose State University. His research interests include Asian American history, migration, and East Asian rare books. In 2015, Yang curated The Huntington Library's first exhibition on Chinese American history, "Y.C. Hong: Advocate for Chinese-American Inclusion."