Videos and Recorded Programs

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. It highlights the work and careers of three 20th-century Chinese artists who paved the way for today’s professional botanical illustrators.

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. How can this relatively newly discovered female poet enlarge our understanding of ways that writers used poetry to interconnect religion, science, and the imagination? How might Pulter’s poetry reveal previously unacknowledged ways that early modern women engaged in intellectual production and the mapping of the heavens, even from their remote estates or bedrooms?

This video is part of the proceedings of the “Joycean Cartographies: Navigating a New Century of Ulysses” conference, which took place at The Huntington to mark the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses in February 2022.

This conference is co-hosted by the President’s office and by the Research Division of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in collaboration with the Library Division. We are grateful for additional support from the Consulate General of Ireland in Los Angeles and the Pomona College Department of English.

Celebrate the publication centennial of James Joyce’s Ulysses in a two-day conference at The Huntington. 

Joyce’s Ulysses uses Dublin as map as well as palimpsest upon which to inscribe his vision of worlds past and present. This conference will explore approaches to literary study that make clearer the verbal and nonverbal coordinates of Joyce’s literary terrain and their global expressions. Topics will range from forms of visualization (schemas, maps, charts, word indexes) to decolonization, intertexts and intermedia, mapping as metaphor and places as texts, in an effort to open up new ways of reading. In tandem with the conference, The Huntington will host the exhibition “Mapping Fiction” on novels and maps from the 16th through the 20th century, including a newly acquired series of engraved maps derived from Ulysses, made by the artist David Lilburn.

This conference is co-hosted by the President’s office and by the Research Division of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in collaboration with the Library Division. We are grateful for additional support from the Consulate General of Ireland in Los Angeles and the Pomona College Department of English.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

WED., FEB. 2

3–5 p.m. | Graduate Seminars Register

Onsite: Paul Saint-Amour (University of Pennsylvania), “Countermapping Ulysses”
Virtual: Vicki Mahaffey (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), “Mapping Oneself onto Ulysses”
7:30–9 p.m. | Ridge Lecture in Literature—Ato Quayson (Stanford University), “Spatial Theory in Ulysses and Post-Colonial Literature”

THURS., FEB. 3

8:30–9:30 a.m. | Registration & Coffee

9:30–9:45 a.m. | Conference Welcome 
Karen R. Lawrence (President, The Huntington) & Steve Hindle (W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, The Huntington)

9:45–10:45 a.m. | Talk —Catherine Flynn (University of California, Berkeley), “In media urbe: Experiencing the City of Ulysses”
Talk given in honor of David Lilburn (1950-2021)

10:45–11 a.m. Break

11 a.m.–12:30 p.m. | Panel 1—Cityscapes: Paris, Dublin, Trieste
Moderator: Colleen Jaurretche (University of California, Los Angeles)

Eric Bulson (Claremont Graduate University), “rue James Joyce”
Shinjini Chattopadhyay (Georgia Institute of Technology), “Looking Beyond Maps: Examining the Decolonial Tours in ‘Wandering Rocks’ ”
Rishona Zimring (Lewis & Clark College), “The New Bloomusalem: Mapping Art Nouveau”

12:30–12:35 p.m. | Ulysses on the Clock #1: Aeolus (Austin Williams, UC Berkeley)

12:35–1:45 p.m. | Lunch

1:45–3 p.m. | Panel 2—Countermappings
Moderator: Kevin Dettmar (Pomona College)

Greg Winston (Husson University), “Joyce’s Questions of Geography from A Portrait to Ulysses”
Megan Cole (University of California, Irvine), “Mapping the ‘Green’ Margins: Ecology and Modernity in Joyce’s Ulysses”
Paul Saint-Amour (University of Pennsylvania), “Countermapping Ulysses”

3–3:10 p.m. | Ulysses on the Clock #2: Sirens (Samuel Slote, Trinity College Dublin) & Ulysses on the Clock #3: Cyclops (James Heffernan, Dartmouth College)

3:10–3:25 p.m. | Break

3:25–5 p.m. | “Language of Flowers” Guided Walk

5–6:30 p.m. | Reception (included with conference registration)
Performance of song cycle set to James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach, composed by Evan Vidar

FRI., FEB. 4

8:30–9:25 a.m. | Registration & Coffee

9:25–9:30 a.m. | Ulysses on the Clock #4: Lotus Eaters (Emily Moell, UC Berkeley)

9:30–11:00 a.m. | Panel 3—Concentric Circles and Venn Diagrams
Moderator: Karen R. Lawrence (The Huntington)

Marilyn Reizbaum (Bowdoin College), “Lenehan’s Plan”
Nico Israel (CUNY Graduate Center/Hunter College), “The Ottoman Empire: Reorienting Joyce’s Cartographic Imagination”
Malcolm Sen (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), “Joyce and the Horizon: From Nation to Planet”

11–11:15 a.m. | Break

11:15–11:20 a.m. | Ulysses on the Clock #5: Hades (Austin Briggs, Hamilton College)

11:20 a.m.–12:20 p.m. | Panel 4—Sensory Mappings
Moderator: Colleen Jaurretche (University of California, Los Angeles)

Leah Senatro (University of California, Irvine), “Embodied Cartographies and Sensorial Experience in Ulysses”
Katherine O’Callaghan (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), “Mapping the City Soundscape”

12:20–1:30 p.m. | Lunch 

1:30–3 p.m. | Panel 5—The Global South
Moderator: Karla Nielsen (The Huntington)

David Kurnick (Rutgers University), “Big Words: Ulysses, Bolaño, and the idea of Latin America”
Michelle Clayton (Brown University), “ ‘Who are they when they’re at home?’ Recent Latin American Ulysses”
Cóilín Parsons (Georgetown University), “Ulysses and the Global South”

3–3:15 p.m. | Break

3:15–3:20 p.m. | Ulysses on the Clock #6: Wandering Rocks

3:20–4:20 p.m. | Talk—Karen Tei Yamashita (University of California, Santa Cruz), “Cartographies of the Anthrobscene”

4:20 p.m. | Closing Remarks

5 p.m. | Conclusion 

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Karen R. Lawrence | President, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
Kevin Dettmar | W.M. Keck Professor of English; Director, The Humanities Studio, Pomona College
Colleen Jaurretche | Continuing Lecturer, Department of English, UCLA
Karla Nielsen | Curator of Literary Collections, The Huntington

Please direct any inquiries to presidentsoffice@huntington.org.

This video is part of the proceedings of the “Joycean Cartographies: Navigating a New Century of Ulysses” conference, which took place at The Huntington to mark the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses in February 2022.

This conference is co-hosted by the President’s office and by the Research Division of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in collaboration with the Library Division. We are grateful for additional support from the Consulate General of Ireland in Los Angeles and the Pomona College Department of English.

The Ridge Lecture in Literature featuring Ato Quayson
Ato Quayson, the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English at Stanford, discusses James Joyce’s use of physical space in Ulysses. Joyce’s Ulysses situates Leopold Bloom’s perambulations as the conduit for thinking about semi-imperial Dublin in the early 20th century. They also raise implications about the complex configurations of space and temporality in the wider Empire in the same period. This talk uses this spatially introverted and extroverted quality of Ulysses to rethink both formalist and Marxist theories of space for literary analysis in the 21st century, offering new readings of other postcolonial literary writers of urban spaces, such as Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children), Ayi Kwei Armah (The Beautyful [sic] Ones are not Yet Born), Naguib Mahfouz (Midaq Alley), and Toni Morrison (Jazz), among many others.

This video is part of the proceedings of the “Joycean Cartographies: Navigating a New Century of Ulysses” conference, which took place at The Huntington to mark the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses in February 2022.

This conference is co-hosted by the President’s office and by the Research Division of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in collaboration with the Library Division. We are grateful for additional support from the Consulate General of Ireland in Los Angeles and the Pomona College Department of English.

A 322-year-old house from Marugame, Japan is being added to the Japanese Garden. This well-preserved structure is an exquisite example of a working magistrate’s residence that once served as the center of village life and home to generations of the same family.

Edward Kamens, professor of Japanese Studies at Yale University, considers the aesthetics of viewing and reading early modern Japanese calligraphy albums—tekagami—in which fragmentary samples of writing by notable writers are brought together for appreciation and display. Focus will be placed on the content of a tekagami in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.