Lynn Avery Hunt (born November 16, 1945) is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her area of expertise is the French Revolution, but she is also well known for her work in European cultural history on such topics as gender.[1] Her 2007 work, Inventing Human Rights, has been heralded as the most comprehensive analysis of the history of human rights. She served as president of the American Historical Association in 2002.[2]
Born in Panama and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, she has her B.A. from Carleton College (1967) and her M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1973) from Stanford University.[3] Before coming to UCLA she taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1974–1987) and the University of Pennsylvania (1987–1998).[4]
Prof. Hunt teaches French and European history and the history of history as an academic discipline. Her specialties include the French Revolution, gender history, cultural history and historiography. Her current research projects include a collaborative study of an early 18th-century work on comparative religion that appeared in 7 volumes with 275 engravings by the artist Bernard Picart.[5]
In 1982 Hunt received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study French History.[6]
Hunt was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2003.[7] In 2014 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.[8]