Eileen M. Hunt

Biography

Eileen Hunt is a Professor of Political Science and a political theorist whose scholarly interests cover modern political thought, feminism, the family, rights, ethics of technology, and philosophy and literature. Her books include Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (SUNY, 2006); Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights (Yale, 2016), and her trilogy on Mary Shelley and political philosophy for Penn Press: Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in 'Frankenstein' (2018); Artificial Life After Frankenstein (2021), which won the David Easton Award "for a book that broadens the horizons of contemporary political science by engaging issues of philosophical significance in political life through any of a variety of approaches in the social sciences and humanities" from the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association; and The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (2024). She also has published six edited or co-edited books—most recently, an edition of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s The Last Man and The Journal of Sorrow (Oxford World’s Classics, 2026). She is the PI for a 2024-27 NEH Scholarly Editions grant to support the completion of the first standard integrated scholarly edition of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman for Volume 4 of Oxford’s Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Hunt has also edited a single-volume edition of Wollstonecraft’s key works for the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series (expected 2027). Her next book projects include a biography of Wollstonecraft for Basic Books/Seal Press, expected in 2029, and two edited volumes, Political Theory and Speculative Literature, co-edited with Duncan Bell (for Cambridge University Press), and The Last Man at 200: Mary Shelley, Postapocalyptic Politics, and the Environmental Humanities (for Bloomsbury’s New Nineteenth Century Series). Hunt's essays, political analyses, reviews, and opinion pieces have appeared in Aeon Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Public Seminar, and The TLS. In addition to the NEH Scholarly Editions program, the ACLS, the Sloan Foundation, and the Bodleian Libraries have supported her research and writing on Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and their enduring legacies for feminism, AI and technology ethics, and literature and political thought.

Check out the WollstoneBlog for my 2024-27 NEH Scholarly Editions project, creating an integrated standard edition of Wollstonecraft's Vindications for Oxford University Press!