New & Noteworthy

FAQ on Library Access

Is proof of vaccination still required to use the Library?
Yes. The Huntington requires all researchers to be fully vaccinated (two weeks have passed since their final dose) by the date of their appointment.

When are you open?
Reading room appointments are available Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.–12 p.m. and 1 p.m.–4 p.m. The Special Collections (Ahmanson) Reading Room is open on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. for the review of rare materials only. The General Collections (Rothenberg) Reading Room is closed to both readers and staff on Saturdays. The library is closed Sundays, major holidays, and on other planned closures.

How can readers reserve admission tickets?
Current readers can request a complimentary pass online. Visit our Library Hours page for more information. We no longer accommodate walk-up requests for admission at the ticketing windows.

What if I can't visit in person?
We are here to help! You are welcome to visit our Virtual Reading Room or order reproductions from the collections. For more information, see Using the Library or Contact Reference.

Register as a new reader

Request an appointment

Questions? Contact Reference

Library Exhibition

Mapping Fiction

“Mapping Fiction” is an exhibition focused on the ways authors and mapmakers have built compelling fictional worlds. On view in the Library’s West Hall, the exhibition is timed to coincide with the centennial of the publication of James Joyce’s groundbreaking 1922 modernist novel, Ulysses.

Drawn entirely from The Huntington’s collections, “Mapping Fiction” includes a first edition of Joyce’s novel and a typescript draft of one of its chapters, cartographically inspired intaglio prints of Dublin as described in the book, other mappings of the novel and the famous texts to which it alludes, and materials related to the annual celebration of Bloomsday in Dublin on June 16—the single day in 1904 during which the novel takes place.

About 70 items will be on view, focused on novels and maps from the 16th through the 20th century—largely early editions of books that include elaborate maps of imaginary worlds. 

Learn More

New Finding Aid

Francis Lieber Papers

Research Conferences

Joycean Cartographies Conference and Graduate Seminars

Joycean Cartographies: Navigating a New Century of “Ulysses”

Research Lectures

Spatial Theory in “Ulysses” and Post-Colonial Literature

Frances M. Beal's Paris Years, 1960–1965

In this lecture, Ula Taylor, professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, discusses Frances M. Beal, a noted journalist, feminist, theoretician, and activist in the United States. However, before her notoriety as an activist, Beal became both a radical and a mother during her time in Paris, France in the '60s. Taylor will explore how Beal became a radical feminist for the Black freedom struggle and how motherhood, particularly single motherhood, shapes the making of a Black radical thinker.

This lecture will be held via Zoom. Zoom link will be sent in confirmation email. This event will be recorded.

Blasting into Space: The Poetics of Faith and Astronomy in Seventeenth-Century England

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 lecture will be held via Zoom. Zoom link will be sent in confirmation email. This event will be recorded.

Sitting with Sarony

In this lecture, David Shields, professor of English language and literature at the University of South Carolina, discusses how Napoleon Sarony (1821–1896) singlehandedly dismantled the traditions of portrait photography in 19th-century America and devised a new photographic ideal. Shields will reconstruct the innovations of Sarony-style portraiture, exploring the idea of personality as performance, providing an anatomy of posing, suggesting why it was Sarony's method that convinced the U.S. Supreme Court that photography deserved copyright protection, and speculating about Sarony's contribution to the historical trajectory of photography from stills to motion pictures.

This lecture will be held via Zoom. Zoom link will be sent in confirmation email. This event will be recorded.

Injury, Dignity, and the Literary History of Rumination

In this lecture, professor Amanda Anderson of Brown University—expanding on key arguments from her recent book Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology—demonstrates that rumination is a productive moral process and not merely a psychological symptom of oversensitivity or trauma endured. 

Some of the most influential frameworks for understanding human thought—in psychology, in moral and political philosophy, and in cognitive science—have failed to recognize the quality, form, and significance of slow, persistent ruminative processes oriented toward experiences of moral shock or disturbance. Such experiences include but are not limited to profound loss, grief, regret, or injury, including those fundamental assaults on dignity we might designate as status-injury. Anderson aims to develop an account of rumination that brings the slow time of literary rumination into dialogue with cognitive science, moral philosophy, psychology, and political philosophy.

Proof of COVID-19 vaccination is required at indoor events at The Huntington. By attending this event, you attest and agree to provide proof of full vaccination. Masks are required indoors, and recommended outdoors, per Los Angeles County’s current COVID-19 safety protocols.

This event will be recorded.

In Conversation with Ourselves: Wright of Derby's "Air Pump" as a Modern Moral Subject

In this in-person lecture, renowned art historian David Solkin will show how Joseph Wright of Derby constructed conflicting messages out of an eclectic mix of elements drawn from different pictorial traditions in An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump and will ask us to consider the artwork's relevance today. When Air Pump made its public debut in 1768, visitors to the Society of Artists exhibition in London were given the novel opportunity to confront a dramatic glimpse of their own world depicted on the scale of life. Enlightened, affluent, and emphatically contemporary, the genteel company surrounding Wright's scientific lecturer embodied the virtues of sociability and sensibility—qualities that a host of 18th-century commentators proudly hailed as the crowning glories of a modern commercial society. But if the Air Pump held up a flattering mirror to its original audience, it also registered the presence of a dissenting body of opinion, one long-dedicated to highlighting the dangers that the progress of commerce posed to personal and collective morality.

Proof of COVID-19 vaccination is required at indoor events at The Huntington. By attending this event, you attest and agree to provide proof of full vaccination. Masks are required indoors, and recommended outdoors, per Los Angeles County's current COVID-19 safety protocols.

This event will be recorded.

Huntington Library Quarterly