Lynn Hunt’s specialties include the French Revolution, gender history, cultural history and historiography. Her books on the French Revolution include Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution and The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Professor Hunt’s book Inventing Human Rights has been heralded as the most comprehensive analysis of the history of human rights. She has also written about historical method and epistemology, including Telling the Truth about History and Beyond the Cultural Turn. Hunt has held teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley. She was President of the American Historical Association in 2002.

About the Lecture: 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,” Lynn Hunt discusses the new attitudes toward bodies and selves that prepared the way for human rights arguments.