Huntington Library Research Conferences

View the calendar for Huntington Conferences on the Huntington Library website.

Our partners at the Huntington Library host academic conferences every year open to the public. Conference details are available approximately two months prior to the conference date on the calendar. Conference registration does not include entrance to the research library. For information about becoming a researcher, visit Using the Library.

Please contact the Huntington Library directly for details regarding their Research Conferences.

Making the Body in Renaissance Italy

Friday & Saturday, January 23 & 24, 2026
Huntington Library

Conveners:
Shannon McHugh, Huntington Library
Jessica Maratsos, Cambridge University

What is a body? Which medical and cultural authorities set its boundaries? How has bodily autonomy evolved in history, alongside advances in science and conceptions of peoplehood? This conference explores these issues at the critical historical juncture of the Italian Renaissance, a moment that gave rise to a scientific revolution alongside a transformation in literary and artistic production. Embracing an interdisciplinary approach to the medical humanities, panels interrogate the supposedly objective autonomy of science by investigating myriad early modern conceptions of the human body. Presenters will share new research demonstrating how discourses around the body were shaped not only by medical treatment and dissection, but by portrayals in art and poetry.

Co-sponsored by the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

United Queendom: Legacies of Gendered Power in the Early Modern British World

Friday & Saturday, February 27 & 28, 2026
Huntington Library

Conveners:
Amanda Herbert, Durham University
Vanessa Wilkie, Huntington Library

During the Tudor and Stuart monarchies, five queens regnant ruled across England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the spaces they claimed as colonies; for many British people living in that time, it was more routine to bow to a woman on the throne than it was to bow to a man. And yet within that period, submission to female rule remained controversial, despite its commonplace; contemporaries viewed it as a cause for anxiety and antagonism rather than accommodation and acceptance. This discomfort continues today. This conference calls together an interdisciplinary community of scholars working on femininity, monarchy, authority, and governance in the early modern British world, to join in assessment of both the early modern experience of gendered power and its longer legacy.

Co-sponsored by the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

Old Women, Race, and Power in the Atlantic World, 1600-Present

Friday & Saturday, March 6 & 7, 2026
Huntington Library

Conveners:
Cori Field, University of Virginia
Kimberly Hamlin, Miami University, Ohio

Negative stereotypes of older women abound in early modern culture: hags, spinsters, crones, witches, and freaks of longevity, or little old ladies, grannies, and mammies. And yet, throughout the transatlantic world, older women have often provided the vital labor – paid, unpaid, and volunteer – advocacy and caregiving that have kept economies, families, and societies functioning and bending toward equality. How might we understand the power and agency of older women – liberated from pregnancy and childrearing – even as the larger culture has tended to dismiss older women as sexless and invisible? This conference gathers scholars who have been trying to answer these questions from a variety of archivally-based disciplines, including history, art history, literature, gender, and race/ethnic studies.

Co-sponsored by the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

Perspectives on Gardens in the American Context

Saturday, March 14, 2026

Conveners:
Nicole Cavender, Telleen/Jorgensen Director of the Huntington Botanical Gardens
Susan Juster, W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, Huntington Library

A one-day symposium in conjunction with the “An American Garden” project.

Extinction Revealed: Tracing the Legacies of Lost Species

Friday & Saturday, April 17 & 18, 2026
Huntington Library

Conveners:
Dan Lewis, Huntington Library
David Bottjer, USC

Extinction has been a part of the planet’s toolbox since life first emerged. But extinction has a rich cultural as well as scientific history, and our responses to extinction and disappearance in the natural world have followed an arc from the Classical era, through the Renaissance and early modern period, up through the nineteenth century, into the 20^th, and up to the present day. Extinction is one of the most pressing topics of the modern era, and its long history, in significant ways, remains misunderstood, and to a significant degree, unscrutinized. What does it mean, for instance, to say that we’ve “lost” something in the first place? Over the centuries, we’ve etched a progression (or has it been a regression?) in thinking about decline and loss in the natural world: from curiosity (and denial) and no sense of loss at all, to learning how parts of the natural world have indeed disappeared, to watchful and somber working on mitigating extinction, to considering that humans should press our hand hard on the survival scale, with potentially very mixed results.

Co-sponsored by the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

Disability and Care in Medieval and Early Modern France

Friday & Saturday, May 1 & 2, 2026
Huntington Library

Conveners:
Alani Hicks-Bartlett, Brown University
Cynthia Nazarian, Northwestern University

Gathering an interdisciplinary group of scholars who work transculturally and transhistorically, this conference offers a capacious collaborative exploration of forms of premodern embodiment and relationality, particularly as these intersect with disability, affect, and care. Conceptualizing the body and mind within their contingent frameworks, our conference will foster dialogue amongst scholars and attendees invested in literature, history, the history of medicine, art history, disability studies, and critical theory. Together we will study the intersections of three rich currents of scholarship centered on the body, on affect, and on care and bring these to bear on questions of emotional and corporeal difference, perceptions of “normativity,” and theorizations of vulnerability, health, and agency.