Lynn Hunt '67
From CarlWiki
Lynn Hunt, Class of 1967, is Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at UCLA.
After graduating from Carleton she earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. Before accepting the position at UCLA, she worked at UC/Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania. She was also a Visiting Professor in France at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes, at Beijing University, and at the Universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam.
In 1991, she was given an Honorary Doctorate by Carleton College and was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
"Lynn Hunt is one of North America's most respected historians. Pre-eminent among historians of the French Revolution, she is also known for her theoretical work in European cultural studies." -Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts
Major publications
- Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France: Troyes and Reims, 1786-1790, 1978, Stanford University Press
- Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, 1984, University of California Press
"This book reframed the debate on the French Revolution, shifting the discussion from the Revolution's role in wider, extrinsic processes (such as modernization, capitalist development, and the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes) to its central political significance: the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society by molding character, culture, and social relations." -Publisher's comments quoted on the Google Book Search page [1]
- The New Cultural History (Studies on the History of Society and Culture, 6), 1989, University of California Press
"An important and provocative argument for the 'new cultural history,' an approach to history that stresses the importance of meaning in social action and the complexity of recovering the dynamics of expression and interpretation in the past." -Michael MacDonald, University of Wisconsin, Madison, quoted on the book's "inside flap." [2]
- The Family Romance of the French Revolution, 1992, University of California Press
This book "injected psychoanalytic thinking into the history of revolutionary politics, with surprising results." -[[3]]
- The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1993, Zone Books
The essays, by historians and literary theorists, examine how pornography emerged between 1500 and 1800 as a literary practice and a category of knowledge intimately linked to the formative moments of Western modernity and the democratization of culture. " -Publisher's statement [4]
- The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, 1996, Bedford/St. Martin's
- Inventing Human Rights: A History, 2007, W. W. Norton and Co.
"In this extraordinary work of cultural and intellectual history, Professor Hunt grounds the creation of human rights in the changes that authors brought to literature, the rejection of torture as a means of finding out truth, and the spread of empathy over the centuries." -Publisher's synopsis quoted at Powells Books [5]
