Eileen Hunt was awarded a competitive National Endowment for the Humanities 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.

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.”

“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.”

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.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on September 25, 2024.