Two faculty members in the College of Arts & Letters have won competitive National Endowment for the Humanities grants that support their respective scholarly projects.
Eileen Hunt, a professor of political science, was awarded a Scholarly Editions and Translations grant to produce the first academic book that integrates and contextualizes 18th-century author Mary Wollstonecraft’s two visionary treatises that advocate for human rights for all.
And Daniel Machiela, associate professor of theology, won a Collaborative Research grant with Penn State University associate professor Tawny Holm to host workshops about their Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls research.
The $37.5 million in NEH grants that were announced in late August support 240 humanities projects across the country.
In the announcement, NEH chair Shelly C. Lowe said she looked forward to the resulting products, discoveries, tools, and programs that will “contribute to our greater understanding of the human endeavor and add to our nation’s wealth of educational and cultural resources.”
A career transformation
Hunt, a political theorist, and Nancy Johnson, a SUNY New Paltz associate dean and English professor, will annotate and track variations in different editions of the British philosopher Wollstonecraft’s interrelated books, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
The researchers’ work — which will provide social, political, literary, and biographical context about the treatises’ origins, development, significance, and impacts — will compose Vol. 4 in Oxford University Press’ six volume Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.
The goal, Hunt said, is to ensure that Wollstonecraft’s theories about human rights, democracy, and women’s education and citizenship can continue to inform interdisciplinary scholarship.
Hunt said she is excited to do much of the project at Notre Dame, including using digital humanities technology to transcribe first and second editions of the treatises acquired by Hesburgh Libraries’ Rare Books & Special Collections.
“This project has literally been career-transformative for me,” Hunt said. “I’m forever grateful to the University and the NEH.”
In the late 1700s and the 1800s, Wollstonecraft’s writing influenced the abolitionist movement in Britain and the United States, as well as the suffrage movement worldwide, said Hunt, a fellow with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and Nanovic Institute for European Studies.
Wollstonecraft advocated for the rights of everyone — including women, people who were enslaved, children, people in all economic classes, and other historically oppressed and marginalized people.
“And yet, she also takes time to sympathize with the aristocracy of the time, whom she sees as morally corrupt,” said Hunt, a concurrent faculty member in the Gender Studies Program. “But she also sees them in need of liberation from the chains of the aristocratic culture which had made them sink so low from a moral perspective.”
A timely lesson
Wollstonecraft also has had a tremendous impact on literature, both through her own writing and the work of her daughter, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein (1818). In A Vindication of Rights of Men, for instance, Wollstonecraft argued the aristocratic class system could turn people into monsters.
“This is, in some ways, a premise of her daughter’s novel Frankenstein,” Hunt said. “That the Creature was not born a monster, but was made one, in particular, by the lack of love, care, and benevolent education from his father/scientist and in the broader society.”
Hunt said Wollstonecraft’s arguments in favor of constitutional democracy are particularly pertinent right now, and that understanding her as a thinker provides insight into how to preserve and advance its principles.
“Our current presidential election is, according to many, the most pivotal election of all time. In some ways, the question is whether we’re going to continue with constitutional democracy, rooted in the written law, or whether we’re going to move toward something populist and fascist,” she said. “That’s one reason why, when we wrote this NEH application, we emphasized the relevance of Mary Wollstonecraft to the future of constitutional democracy itself.”
"I'm grateful that Notre Dame has a culture of encouraging faculty to apply for these prestigious grants.”
Hunt has written widely on Wollstonecraft and Shelley — her 2021 book, Artificial Life After Frankenstein, won the David Easton Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association, and her latest book, The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination, was published in April by University of Pennsylvania Press.
In 2022, Hunt and Johnson applied for, but did not win, the same Scholarly Editions and Translations grant. But with support from Josh Tychonievich, associate director of research development in the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, they incorporated NEH reviewers’ suggestions into their proposal and resubmitted it.
“It took us two grant cycles to win. Josh encouraged us to try again, and I’m so glad that he did,” Hunt said. “From this process, I learned to never give up and to listen to the advice of the reviewers. I'm grateful that Notre Dame has a culture of encouraging faculty to apply for these prestigious grants.”
Machiela to organize and host conferences on the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls
Machiela and Holm, an associate professor of Jewish studies and classics and ancient Mediterranean studies at Penn State, will plan two workshops centered on “The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls at the Crossroads of Empire: Negotiating Jewish Life Under Foreign Rule.” The workshops will bring together scholars of the ancient world from 13 leading universities representing six different countries.
Scheduled to occur at Notre Dame in the summer of 2025 and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in the spring of 2026, the workshops will focus on how Jews thought about their place among the imperial cultures of the ancient Near East. The ancient Jewish scrolls from the Judean Desert provide a window into this period.
"The Bible tells of Israel's exile at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians, which provoked a whole new way of thinking about Israel in relation to other nations. The Aramaic scrolls that we will study were originally composed a century or more after the biblical events of exile took place, and wrestle with how to follow God and lead a righteous life while living under the hugely powerful foreign empires of Persia and Greece," Machiela said. "Most of the texts we will discuss reemerged only with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s and 1950s, and their publication after 2000."
Machiela examines how the understudied Aramaic scrolls reinterpret parts of the Old Testament, providing insight into how the biblical text was understood and taught around the turn of the Common Era.
One lesson from the scrolls is that the basic concerns of the Jews who wrote them more than 2,000 years ago were not so different from the concerns of some people of faith today.
“We live in a globalized society where many cultures are crashing together at all times,” he said. “For people of faith who claim the Bible as an important part of their identity, it's often difficult to navigate how that relates to the complex world we're also part of just as human beings today. That same problem — how to relate the past to the present and faith to a broader culture in which many faiths were competing — was a critical issue for whoever wrote these scrolls.”
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on September 25, 2024.