Watch, Read, Listen

Key scholars come together at this two-day conference to assess developments in the study of Restoration women writers such as Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish (the Duchess of Newcastle), their reception in their own period, and increasing popularity today. Behn and Cavendish have international societies devoted to the study of their works, and both they and others such as Katherine Philips (“Orinda”) and Anne Finch (the Countess of Winchilsea) now regularly appear on the undergraduate curriculum. Major publishers, including Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, have recently commissioned scholarly editions of the works of Lucy Hutchinson, Anne Finch, Aphra Behn, and others.

Speakers:

Session 1: Publication and Its Perils

Welcome: Steve Hindle, The Huntington
Introduction: Elaine Hobby, Loughborough University (Convener)

David Norbrook, Emeritus Fellow, Merton College, Oxford
“Lucy Hutchinson and the Perils of Publication”

Jennifer Keith, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
“Anne Finch’s Early Readers in Manuscript and Print”

Session 2: Machines, Networks, and Book Catalogues

Marie-Louise Coolahan, National University of Ireland Galway
“Late Seventeenth-Century Book Owners and Women’s Writing”

Julia Flanders, Northeastern University
“Reading Models, Modelling Reading: Digital Texts and Human Readers”

Closing Discussion: Elaine Hobby

Session 3: Plays on Stage

Elizabeth H. Hageman, Professor Emerita, University of New Hampshire
“Katherine Philips’s Plays on Stage, in Manuscript, and in Print”

Elaine Hobby, Loughborough University
“Staging Reading in Aphra Behn”

Joyce MacDonald, University of Kentucky
“ ‘Dazeling white’: Erasing Blackness in Mary Pix’s Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks”

Session 4: Reading Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: Past, Present and Future

Lisa Sarasohn, Professor Emerita, Oregon State University
“ ‘But to cut off tedious and unnecessary disputes, I return to the expressing of my own opinion…’ (Philosophical Letters, 1664, 81.) Margaret Cavendish’s Gripers and Groupies”

Shawn W. Moore, Florida Southwestern State College
“Reading Margaret Cavendish in the Twenty-First Century”

Closing Discussion: All participants, chaired by Elaine Hobby

Funding provided by The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute

Join Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer, for this short and insightful discussion about artist Aria Dean, as part of the Lunchtime Art Talk series on the exhibition “Made in L.A. 2020: a version.”

WATCH

On April 8, 1949, a three-year-old girl fell down an abandoned water well in San Marino, California. The television coverage of the rescue attempt tapped into the deep spring of attention that a live broadcast can bring to news. Historian William Deverell visits the site of the tragic accident and discusses how the failed rescue of Kathy Fiscus previewed the wave of change that television would carry across the country.

The  Hdoc series examines The Huntington through short documentaries that expose the archives, collections, and stories that make the institution unique.

Join Nika Chilewich, curatorial assistant at the Hammer, for this short and insightful discussion about artist Kandis Williams, as part of the Lunchtime Art Talk series on the exhibition “Made in L.A. 2020: a version.”

WATCH

Join our digital library team for an overview of the process of digitizing documents to make them available to researchers in the Huntington Digital Library. The team demonstrates the steps to digitize the illustrated 15th-century bestiary, Dialogus Creaturarum, ascribed to Nicolaus Pergamenus and the Milanese doctor Mayno de Mayneriis. This event is part of the ongoing webinar series The Multi-Storied Library, presented by the library’s Reader Services department.