Bedari Kindness Institute

This concert featuring Ambroise Aubrun (violin) and Steven Vanhauwaert (piano) pays tribute to the refined tradition of musical salons, tracing their influence from nineteenth-century Vienna to early twentieth-century Los Angeles. At its heart is Guillaume Lekeu’s Violin Sonata, performed in homage to Alfred Megerlin, the Belgian violin virtuoso and concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the 1920s. Through works by Schubert, Fauré, Debussy and others, the program evokes the elegance, intimacy, and cultural dialogue that defined salon music across generations and continents.

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What does it mean to feel stony? John Milton’s 1671 verse drama Samson Agonistes retells the last day of the biblical Judge Samson, as he moves from an initial feeling that his disabled body is a “Sepulcher, a moving grave” to his eventual toppling of the Temple of Dagon occasioned by a mysterious set of “rousing motions.” This talk by Shaun Nowicki, Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a recipient of the 2025-26 Kenneth Karmiole Graduate Research Fellowship at the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, examines Milton’s deployment of the lithic as a structuring metaphor for understanding both Samson’s initial abjection and the eventual return of his strength. In doing so, the play both draws on emergent cultural understandings of disability as an abject category of being and offers a refutation of that paradigm by considering the potential vivacity of non-living things and the possibilities inherent in the alliances between the human and nonhuman world.

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The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) made significant strides towards establishing colonial control over the Indonesian islands in the seventeenth century. When the Company founded Batavia in 1619, the city became the administrative hub of an extensive mercantile network and served as its Asian headquarters. In this talk, Emma Gagnon, Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a recipient of the 2025-26 Kenneth Karmiole Graduate Research Fellowship at the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, examines the images of Batavia in Johan Nieuhof’s (1618-1672) illustrated travelogues. Nieuhof spent years in and out of the colonial capital, and his accounts provide some of the earliest images of Batavia. This talk demonstrates how the city’s Dutch identity was defined not only by its built environment but also through the dissemination of these forms in the Dutch Republic’s print culture.

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The German-based ATOS Trio will perform in Los Angeles for the first time at the Clark Library with selections from Joseph Haydn, Gaspar Cassadó, and Franz Schubert. Tickets are limited and go on sale at 12 noon on Tuesday, March24. Please visit the event website for full details.

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In the 2025-26 Core Program conference, historians of the Ottoman, Qing, and Mughal empires revisit the problem of comparison by considering synchronicities and structural parallels across Asia. The third conference, "Empires of Things," looks at Society, Materiality, and Knowledge. In what new ways did merchants trade, how did artisans and craftsmen organize themselves, how did guilds transform, how did the pious communicate with each other, how did common subjects live, how did spatial imaginaries change? Organized by Professors Choon Hwee Koh & Meng Zhang (History, UCLA) and Abhishek Kaicker (History, UC Berkeley).

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A central figure in the literary and cultural spheres of the late nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was also the originator of Irish modernism. Still, literary scholarship has largely sidelined his powerful influence over this movement. Regarded by his contemporaries as an outstanding artist, critic, and public intellectual until his imprisonment in 1895, current research on Wilde tends to confine his leading presence within the late Victorian aesthetic and decadent movements. By highlighting this overlooked aspect of Wilde’s legacy, “Oscar Wilde’s Modernist Legacies” will raise critical and theoretical awareness of his influence over modernist innovation not only within the field of literary production but also in related artistic areas in Ireland and beyond.

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