Lecture by Tracy Wolk (Landscape Designer) and Stephanie Landregan (Landscape Architect and Director Altadena Green). Moderated by Brian Brodersen, (Landscape Architect and Principal/Owner Brodersen Associates). Join us for the inaugural Ahmanson Lecture at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, an evening exploring how history, design, and stewardship can shape the future of Los Angeles’s most meaningful landscapes. Landscape designer Tracy Wolk shares her vision for the Clark’s historic gardens, reimagining their early 20th-century character for a future grounded in sustainability, resilience, and respect for heritage. She will be joined by Stephanie Landregan, director of Altadena Green, a community initiative established after the Altadena fires to protect and...

In this year’s Core Program, historians of the Ottoman, Qing, and Mughal empires revisit the problem of comparison by considering synchronicities and structural parallels across Asia. The second conference looks at Imperial Operations. How did empires work? What did the everyday operations of imperial rule look like? Early modern empires confronted the same “great enemy” of distance which severely constrained all actions, from government communications to tax collection. The systems for delegating authority and distributing tasks that the Ottomans, Mughals, and Qing developed to address these common problems shared some essential features despite their autonomous development and local variations, and...