Eileen M. Hunt

Fellow, Nanovic Institute for European Studies
Concurrent Faculty, Gender Studies

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. She has taught at Notre Dame since she received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale in 2001. She has five solo-authored books: Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (SUNY, 2006); Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women's Human Rights (Yale, 2016); Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in 'Frankenstein' (Penn Press, 2018), Artificial Life After Frankenstein (Penn Press, 2021), and The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Post-Apocalyptic Imagination (forthcoming 2024). In 2022, Artificial Life After Frankenstein won the David Easton Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association, 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." With several editions of the works of Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft currently in progress, Hunt has published five edited or co-edited books: Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville (co-edited with Jill Locke for Penn State's Feminist Interpretations series, 2009); Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston by Hannah Mather Crocker (an annotated documentary edition of the c. 1822-29 manuscript, co-edited with Sarah L. Houser for NEHGS, 2011; winner of the triennial Edition Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers); A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (a paperback edition of the 1792 book, designed for classroom use, with new scholarly commentaries and timelines, for Yale's Rethinking the Western Tradition series, 2014); The Wollstonecraftian Mind (38 chapters from an international team of contributors, co-edited with Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee for Routledge's Philosophical Minds series, 2019); and the two-volume reference set Portraits of Wollstonecraft (with 31 annotated illustrations, for Bloomsbury Philosophy, 2021, with a single-volume paperback forthcoming in 2023). For Oxford World's Classics, she is at work on a bicentennial dual edition of Mary Shelley's global plague novel The Last Man (1826) alongside its diaristic source text, The Journal of Sorrow (c. 1822-26). Also for Oxford University Press, in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series, she is editing Wollstonecraft: Selected Writings (expected 2027), an annotated single-volume edition of her published works, designed for classroom use. In support of her research and writing, Hunt has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (2015-16), the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (2019), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Public Understanding of Science, Technology & Economics Program (2019-20), and the Carr-Thomas-Ovenden Fellowship in English Literature at the Bodleian Library (2022). On topics ranging from Frankenstein and AI, to Mary Shelley and the Covid-19 pandemic, to Orwell and Dracula, to Wollstonecraft and love, her essays, political analyses, and opinion pieces have appeared in Aeon Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Public Seminar, and The TLS. Her current book project is The Women Who Made Orwell, a feminist intellectual history that recovers the story of how a series of unsung literary women shaped the Anglo-Indian boy Eric Blair into one of the greatest political writers in the English language, George Orwell. Hunt works with graduate students on a range of topics in political theory and the history of political thought, including feminism, comparative political theory, the European (and Protestant) Enlightenment, the human rights of women and children, British liberalism in the long nineteenth century, utopian and dystopian literature, and modern political science fiction as a resource for technology ethics and AI ethics today.