Eileen Hunt

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 published five solo-authored books, including her recent 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 five edited or co-edited books—most recently, in a one-volume, updated, illustrated paperback, Portraits of Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Feminist Icon, 1785-2020 (Bloomsbury, 2023).

She is presently at work on several scholarly editions of the works of Wollstonecraft and Shelley for Oxford University Press. Her dual, annotated, cross-referenced edition of Shelley's pandemic novel The Last Man alongside her private Journal of Sorrow will be published by Oxford World's Classics to mark these intertwined works' bicentennial in January 2026. Together with Nancy Johnson (SUNY-New Paltz), she is the recipient of 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 OUP's Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (editor-in-chief Emma Clery). Hunt is also producing a new, single-volume, annotated edition of Wollstonecraft's Selected Writings, designed for classroom use at the undergraduate and graduate levels, for the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series (expected 2027).

Her next solo-authored book project is a feminist intellectual biography of Wollstonecraft for Basic Books/Seal Press, expected in 2029. 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, 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.

Hunt earned a PhD in political science from Yale University in 2001.

KDR Assistant(s):
Clare Duffy
Morgan Golden
Adrian Zheng