News from the Director of Research - December 2024
In This Issue:
- Highlights from fall 2024
- A look ahead to 2025, including our conference in January
As the year winds down and we prepare to observe the holidays, the Research division celebrates a successful fall term of scholarship, conferences, and lectures.
Our long-term fellows have settled into their routines of working in the Library’s magnificent collections, meeting weekly to workshop their projects with one another, explorin g Southern California’s rich art and cultural offerings (and nature), and enjoying personalized tours of The Huntington’s collections. Art curators Melinda McCurdy, Lauren Cross, and Dennis Carr led the fellows on a tour of the European and American galleries in October; Sean Lahmeyer and Robert Hori provided a behind-the-scenes tour of the Botanical Gardens in November; and co-curators Karla Nielsen, Melinda McCurdy, and Kristen Anthony shared the riches of the PST exhibition “Storm Cloud” in the Boone Gallery in December.
The 2024-25 Long-Term Research Fellows. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
Over the past three months, the division hosted two conferences and three public lectures. Fans and scholars of the extra-illustrated book met in September to explore this fascinating polymath form, and in early November over 100 people assembled for an interdisciplinary conference organized to complement the “Storm Cloud” exhibition, which explores the changing relationship between the human and nonhuman natural world over the course of the long 19th century, as charted in the work of writers and visual artists.
Two of our long-term fellows (Alison Hirsch and Megan Kate Nelson) delivered lectures on their projects in October, and in December Frederick Ilchman of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston explored Francisco Goya’s portraiture in a lecture that highlighted The Huntington’s newly acquired Portrait of José Antonio Caballero (1807).
Left: Alison Hirsch, Center: Megan Kate Nelson, Right: Frederick Ilchman.
Looking Ahead to 2025
In January, we’ll kick off the new year with a major conference, “Abortion in American History: Intimate Decisions, Medical Knowledge, and Legal Decrees in the Two Centuries Before Roe v. Wade.”
New academic research on abortion history has surged in recent years, spurred by the lead-up to the Dobbs decision in 2022. Dobbs arrived at a time when a solid court majority professed reliance on originalism, a form of legal analysis that uses constitutional history and its presumed original meaning as the basis for court decisions. Historians have been busy presenting amicus briefs, both in Dobbs and in a continuing flurry of state court cases since the ruling returned abortion law to the states. Accurately understanding both legal and reproductive history has never been more important.
Draper, Alexander C., Observations on abortion, with an account of the means, both medical and mechanical, employed to produce that effect, together with advice to females (Philadelphia: 1839). | Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.
Upcoming Lectures
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Jan. 15, 2025: Susan Amussen will deliver the Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellow Lecture, “Peregrine Tyam and Mrs. Mary Verney: Patriarchy and Race in Late 17th-Century England.”
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Jan. 22, 2025: Kelly Lytle Hernandez will deliver the Ray Allen Billington Lecture in the History of the American West, “The Whites-Only Immigration Regime.”
Susan Juster
W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research