We’re lucky to welcome the distinguished historian, Lynn Hunt, who will be on campus on Tuesday, February 26. Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at UCLA & Former President of the American Historical Association. She has written a number of influential works on topics such as the history of the French Revolution, the origins of human rights, time in history, and much more. She’ll be giving an evening talk on “The Future of History: Globalization & Modernity,” on Tuesday, February 26 at 7:00pm in the Lean Lecture Room. Refreshments will be available before the talk, so come early. She will also participate in a faculty workshop in the morning and will have time to meet students during the day. If you would like to meet Prof. Hunt, please contact Greg Shaya, Chair of History. I include a few more details here on the talk and on Prof. Hunt’s work. I hope you can join us!
The Future of History: Globalization and Modernity
Historians are not great predictors of the future; their concern, after all is with the past. Yet our conceptions of history are very much influenced by present day concerns. Two of those concerns are closely linked together: globalization and modernity. Is the recent interest in globalization a fresh air for history that has been for so long shaped by the needs of the nation-state? Or is it just another word for “modernization,” that is, bringing modernity to those parts of the world that have yet to experience its benefits and drawbacks? Can history even make sense without a concept of modernity?
Lynn Hunt
The Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at UCLA, Lynn Hunt was born in Panama, raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has her B.A. from Carleton College (1967) and her M.A. and Ph.D. (1973) from Stanford University. Before going to UCLA she taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley where she won the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award. She has written on the origins of human rights, the French Revolution, historical method and epistemology, time in history, the origins of religious toleration as well as the history of pornography and has co-authored widely used textbooks on western civilization and the French Revolution. Her books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Polish and Czech. She was President of the American Historical Association in 2002 and awarded the Nancy Lyman Roelker Award for graduate mentorship by the American Historical Association in 2010.