Lynn Hunt

Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Historiography (2013-2014)

The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Historiography is an ambition initiative at the University of Oxford that explores the many ways in which history is made, recorded, and shared. The Visiting Professorship in Historiography is hosted by Trinity College, Oxford. It has been made possible by the generous support of the Blavatnik Family Foundation.

Lynn Hunt is Eugene Weber Professor of Modern European History at UCLA.

Lynn Hunt’s Humanitas Visiting Professorship, Dilemmas of History in a Global Age, examined the relationships between human rights, emotions, and our idea of the ‘self’.

Declarations of rights, Hunt argued in her opening lecture Do Human Rights Need a History?, do not emerge from long historical developments but rather from an acute sense of outrage. This poses a problem for the assertions of ‘timelessness’ and ‘self-evidence’ that often accompany declarations of rights.

Sandra Fredman, (Oxford’s Rhodes Professor of Law and the co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Human Rights for Future Generations) gave a response to Hunt’s lecture, building on the ideas raised as a way of looking at the future of human rights.

Her Humanitas tenure was concluded by a roundtable discussion on the Histories of the Self with Professor Lyndal Roper (Oxford’s Regius Professor of History) and Professor Elleke Boehmer (Oxford’s Professor of World Literature in English).