In this lecture, Wendy Wall, Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University, describes how 17th-century woman Hester Pulter, while sick and confined to her bedroom after giving birth to her 15th child, sought solace in an unusual way: she wrote poems about taking off into space to explore planets in the heliocentric universe. While intellectuals of the day feared that new conceptions of astronomy undermined cherished religious beliefs, Pulter was exhilarated in incorporating cutting-edge ideas about space into a new type of devotional poem.
In his book, Ordering the Myriad Things, Nicholas K. Menzies, research fellow in The Huntington's Center for East Asian Garden Studies, examines how traditional knowledge of plants in China gave way to scientific botany between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. This talk focuses especially on images of plants, contrasting their representation in late-imperial Chinese painting and materia medica to the conventions of scientific botanical drawing.
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens announced today that it has acquired the papers of Will Alexander (b. 1948), a multimedia artist and award-winning writer.
In 1968, the third Monday of February was designated Presidents Day—a U.S. national holiday celebrating all presidents, past and present. The choice of the date was tied to Feb. 22, George Washington’s birthday, which had already been set as a holiday for federal workers in 1885.
Produced in partnership with LA Opera, the production is based on Lisa See’s book about her Chinese American family and was composed by Nathan Wang, 2022–23 Cheng Family Foundation Visiting Artist
The story of pollination seems pretty basic: Plants provide incentives—most often sustenance in the form of nectar and pollen—to entice various animals to transport pollen from flower to flower.
Alyssa Collins, assistant professor of English language and literature and African American studies at the University of South Carolina, is The Huntington's first Octavia E. Butler Fellow for the study of the renowned science fiction writer.