Forum on the Humanities and the Public World

Lynn Hunt, Professor of History, UCLA
“Inventing Human Rights”

Friday, October 5, 2007
2pm  |  Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall

What made it possible for Thomas Jefferson to assert of equal rights that “we hold these truths to be self-evident”? Why did Europeans come to find legally-sanctioned torture and cruel punishments unacceptable after condoning them for centuries? In “Inventing Human Rights,” based on her recent research and book, Lynn Hunt will discuss the new attitudes toward bodies and selves that prepared the way for human rights arguments.

Lynn Hunt teaches French and European history and the history of history as an academic discipline. Her specialties include the French Revolution, gender history, cultural history and historiography. Her current projects include a collaborative study of the origins of religious toleration in the early 18th century and discussion of new directions in cultural history.

Her most recent book, Inventing Human Rights (2007), traces the origins of human rights in France, Great Britain and the US in the 18th century. She has written extensively on the French Revolution, including: Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France (1978); Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984); and The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992). She has also written about historical method and epistemology, including: with Joyce Appleby and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (1994); and with Victoria Bonnell, Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999). In addition, she has edited collections on the history of eroticism, pornography, and on human rights; and co-authored a western civilization textbook, The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures (2nd ed. 2005). Her books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Polish and Czech.

Born in Panama and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, Lynn Hunt has her B.A. from Carleton College (1967) and her M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1973) from Stanford University. Before going to UCLA she taught at the University of Pennsylvania (1987-1998) and the University of California, Berkeley (1974-1987).

Links

UCLA faculty page.
Article for the ACLS: Tradition Confronts Change: The Place of the Humanities in the University.