Mary Wollstonecraft at Notre Dame

With NEH grant, Eileen Hunt will ensure Wollstonecraft’s treatises about human rights continue to inform scholarship

• Eileen Hunt will produce the first book that integrates and contextualizes Mary Wollstonecraft’s two visionary treatises that advocate for human rights for all and Daniel Machiela will host workshops about Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls research.

National Endowment for the Humanities Grant Awards and Offers, August 2024

• A list of NEH Grant awards and offers by state, from August 2024.

September-December 2024 | Wollstonecraft: Revolution & Textual Evidence

Against Edmund Burke’s contention that the French Revolution was a “monstrous tragi-comic scene,” Mary Wollstonecraft hastily composed a defense in the pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). Her work quickly went into second edition, where she tinkered with her language and rhetorical strategy. Several years later, the same editorial mindset is evident in Wollstonecraft’s original and revised A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, where she brings women’s rights into the larger discussion of civil rights. The Hesburgh Libraries recently acquired multiple early editions of Wollstonecraft’s work, which bear witness to her thought process as she works out and reworks her early feminist philosophy.

This spotlight is curated by Daniel Johnson (English; Digital Humanities; and FTT Librarian).