Left: Shannon McHugh, assistant director of Research. Right: Brett Rushforth, editor-in-chief of the Huntington Library Quarterly.
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens has appointed Shannon McHugh as assistant director of research and Brett Rushforth as the new editor-in-chief of the Huntington Library Quarterly (HLQ), the institution’s peer-reviewed academic journal that has been in continuous production since 1937.
McHugh comes to The Huntington from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she was an associate professor of French and Italian. She joined The Huntington on Jan. 13. Rushforth, who was previously an associate professor of history at the University of Oregon, has been in his new role at The Huntington since July 2024.
“Shannon is a scholar of exceptional breadth, with interests ranging from Renaissance Italian literature to contemporary fan culture, and an experienced organizer of public humanities events,” said Susan Juster, The Huntington’s W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research. “She is the ideal person to help connect Huntington researchers’ scholarship with broader public audiences.”
“The Huntington is also fortunate to welcome Brett, a distinguished scholar of the early modern Atlantic world,” Juster said. “Under his leadership, the HLQ will expand its reach to include early modern studies more broadly, covering scholarship rooted in continental Europe, the African Diaspora, and the Indigenous Americas, as well as their intersections with the worlds of the Mediterranean and the Pacific and Indian oceans.”
A specialist in Italian and French Renaissance literature and gender, McHugh is the author of Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy (Amsterdam University Press, 2023). As the 2023–24 Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at The Huntington, she conducted research on her project “Women’s Reproductive Lives in Renaissance Lyric Poetry.” McHugh is also working on a book about Walt Disney’s library, a project stemming from a Huntington U course that she taught in conjunction with the 2022–23 exhibition “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts.”
“As a native of Southern California, joining The Huntington is a dream,” McHugh said. “It is a world apart—a place where exceptional libraries, galleries, and gardens hold countless stories waiting to be mined by the curious thinkers who visit every year. What an exciting moment to join the Research division under the visionary guidance of Susan Juster and as it evolves with Brett Rushforth’s remarkable dedication and scholarly agility. This is truly a singular opportunity.”
As a 2022–23 National Endowment for the Humanities long-term fellow at The Huntington, Rushforth conducted research for his project “Rebel Slaves, Rebel Planters: Informal Economies and Negotiated Power in 18th-Century Martinique.” He has written widely on Indigenous America, French colonialism and empire, and the African Diaspora. Rushforth is the author of the award-winning Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) and the co-author, with Christopher Hodson, of Beyond the Ocean: A New History of France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions, which will be published by Oxford University Press this summer.
“I am thrilled to be at The Huntington and honored to join the Research division under the inspired leadership of Susan Juster,” Rushforth said. “I’m here because I believe in the social value of the humanities. In this moment of cultural, political, and environmental upheaval, what could be more meaningful—or more hopeful—than investing in careful, contextual research on the human condition? What could be more urgent than ensuring the broadest possible access to these resources and the insights they generate? I look forward to pursuing these values as I guide the Huntington Library Quarterly into its next phase. And I couldn’t be happier to be working alongside Shannon McHugh. Her talent as a scholar of Renaissance literature is matched only by her drive to make humanities research a truly public good.”
Rushforth has already begun expanding the scope of the HLQ, going beyond its traditional strengths in early modern British literature and history to encompass a more global approach to early modern studies. Similarly, one of McHugh’s crucial roles will be to help connect the research of Huntington fellows with broader audiences while making connections between The Huntington’s historical collections and the present. This broadening of scope and audience is reflective of The Huntington’s strategic priorities and part of its ongoing mission to support scholarship among a diverse and global community.
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