Lectures/Talks

Huntington Library Open House @UCR
Wednesday, October 1, 2025 3pm to 5:30pm

The Huntington Comes to UCR!

Join Huntington Library Director of Research Susan Juster, members of her staff, and Huntington curators for an Open House event at UC Riverside. Juster and her team will share insights into the Huntington’s fellowship program, the application process, and what makes for a strong application.

The Huntington is a word-class research institution, which promotes humanities scholarship on the basis of its library holdings and art collections. 

Whether you are a graduate student or a faculty member, please mark your calendar. This is a unique opportunity to learn and connect. An informal reception with drinks and snacks will follow the presentations.

Schedule

3:00-4:30 – Presentations from Huntington programming team, with Q&A
4:30-5:30 – Reception

Speakers

Susan Juster oversees the Research division that hosts more than 150 long- and short-term research fellows each year, selected through a competitive, peer-review process that provides $1.4 million in awards.

Brett Rushforth is editor-in-chief of the Huntington Library Quarterly, a peer-reviewed academic journal featuring original research and new perspectives on early modern art, literature, history, science, medicine, and material culture.

Shannon McHugh, the assistant director of research, helps connect the research of Huntington fellows with broader audiences while making connections between The Huntington’s historical collections and the present.

Vanessa Wilkie, Ph.D., is the head of the Library Curatorial department and curates the Library’s renowned collections of medieval manuscripts and British history.

Diva Zumaya, Ph.D., the associate curator of European art, researches The Huntington’s collection of European art, finds new connections between objects, and collaborates with Library and Botanical colleagues.

Sponsored by the UCR Department of History and the Being Human initiative at the Center for Ideas and Society.

 

UC Riverside Retirees’ and Emeriti Associations with additional sponsorship by UCR Osher and UCR’s Office of Gift Planning Present
The Edward A. Dickson Emeritus/a Professorship Lecture Series

 

Dickson Flyer Malcolm BakerMalcolm Baker, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History
THE ART-HISTORICAL GENRE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME?  Authorship, Objects and Reconfiguring the Sculptural Catalogue Raisonné

Tuesday, June 3, 2025
3:00 – 4:30 p.m. with Reception to follow
In-person at University Extension Building 1101 in the University Village
Livestreamed via Zoom

 

Vera Molnar’s Drawing Machines: A Media Archaeology of Early Computer Graphics

Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, Ph.D Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History at Scripps College
Wednesday, May 14 at 5:30pm, INTS 1128

How do you draw a line with a computer? When the Hungarian-born, Paris-based artist Vera Molnar (1924-2023) began exper-imenting with electronic computers in 1968, this task was not as simple as the click of a mouse or the swipe of a finger. Molnar had to translate her visual language of geometric abstraction into alphanumeric instructions that a computer would understand. Though she generated thousands of computer plotter “drawings” over the next two decades, she left behind limited technical documentation from this period, leaving it up to viewers to imagine the algorithms behind her compositions. This lecture presents a media archeology of the artist’s work –– a hands-on approach that engages not only with her drawings but also her process of drawing with a computer. I will recount my “reenactment” of Molnar’s series Lettres de ma mère (My mother’s letters, 1988) using obsolete hardware and software that the artist once used. This practice-led approach foregrounds the artist’s process and historically contextualizes the material history and user experience of early interactive computing, which have been all but forgotten.

 

 

Book Talk: Leaving Legacies and the Making of Early Modern South Asia

Book Talk: Leaving Legacies and the Making of Early Modern South Asia

Shayan Rajani, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History, Michigan State University
Monday, May 5 at 4:00pm, CHASS INTS 1111

Shayan Rajani is an Assistant Professor of History at Michigan State University. He is the author of Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Early Modern South Asia published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. His research interests include early modern South Asia, particularly the region of Sindh, the history of the individual and self-representation, and gender and sexuality.

Co-Sponsored by the Department of History, the Asian Studies Program, and the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program.

 

Yong Soon Min: Reimagining the Inheritances of Empire

Kylie Ching Talk, April 17, 2025

Kylie Ching, Ph.D.
UCR Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow

How does one remember an unending war? Within U.S. history, the Korean War remains the “forgotten war,” overshadowed by World War II and the Vietnam War. For the late artist, activist, and educator Yong Soon Min, this contradiction makes the Korean War an important site to parse through its history and meaning. Rather than focusing on scenes of spectacular militarized violence, she draws attention to how the civil war continues to shape everyday life in Korea and its diaspora. Centering personal and embodied experiences as a form of history, Min repurposes photographs across family and state archives to reimagine alternative kinships that disrupt U.S. Cold War historiographies. This talk will explore two works — a photomontage called Talking Herstory from 1990 and a multi-media installation entitled Mother Load from 1996 that was later remade in 2014. Within these works, Min reveals the visible and invisible inheritances of war, such as memories, physical objects like photographs and clothes, and family relations.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS TALK HAS BEEN RESCHEDUED FOR APRIL 17

In-person
Thursday, April, 17, 2025 at 5:00pm
CHASS Interdisciplinary South, 1111

The Huntington Library hosts

Music in the Early Spanish Americas, Performance Spaces, and Archives

Missale romanum ordinarium

Missale romanum ordinarium (Mexico City: Antonio de Espinosa, 1561). RB 32667. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Ma huel cenquiza, ma nechicaui
(May they come together, may they assemble)

These opening lines of a Nahuatl garden canticle from the Psalmodia Christiana (Mexico City, 1583) set the stage for a conference focusing on the musical sounds, performance spaces, and sonic traces of the early modern Hispanic world. The Huntington Library is the ideal venue for an interdisciplinary conference that aims to examine the musical sounds that once reverberated across the Spanish Americas. Today, these musical and sonic legacies are preserved at the Huntington Library. To highlight these little-studied collections and encourage their value in pushing musical-humanistic research forward, this conference will bring together interdisciplinary scholars to discuss their current, cutting-edge research on the performances, performance spaces, and archives of this music.

Two-day conference | General: $35, Students and Huntington Fellows: Free | Optional lunch: $20 each day. 

Conference registration includes general admission to The Huntington. Lunch reservations will close on March 17 at noon.

Friday, March 21, 2025, 8:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 22, 2025, 9:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.
Education and Visitor Center, Haaga Hall
Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Rd. San Marino, CA 91108
For questions about this event, please email researchconference@huntington.org or call 626-405-3432.