Eileen M. Hunt

Eileen Hunt is 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 five solo-authored books, including Artificial Life After Frankenstein (Penn Press, 2021), which won the David Easton Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association in 2022, and the forthcoming The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Post-Apocalyptic Imagination (expected 2024). She also has published five edited or co-edited books and has several editions of the works of Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft currently in progress. 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.

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).

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.

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