Professor Eileen M. Hunt (Political Science) runs the lab with the support of a team of undergraduate research assistants.
Together they are using the tools of the digital humanities to help create a variety of scholarly and teaching editions of Wollstonecraft's works that defend the post-revolutionary ideals of constitutional democracy and universal human rights. They are collaborating with Professor Hunt to build an open-access digital edition of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London, 1792) that will show in the margins of its pages all the changes that the author made to the text from the first edition to the second edition. This searchable digital edition of the Rights of Woman will be published on this website by the end of 2025. We hope it will be an accessible and useful teaching and research resource for students and teachers at the secondary and university levels. Public understanding of the evolution of the arguments of Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman is essential for the study of modern constitutional democracy and human rights theories. The Rights of Woman shaped the ideas of many of the intellectual and political leaders of the early American republic, including John and Abigail Adams and Aaron Burr. It also was the single most crucial text to shape the philosophical views of the greatest advocates of women's rights in the nineteenth-century United States, Hannah Mather Crocker, Lucretia Mott, Sarah Grimké, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony.
