Hunt to address human rights for Curti lectures

This year’s Merle Curti Lectures will be delivered by professor Lynn Hunt of University of California at Los Angeles on “The Eighteenth-Century Origins of Human Rights” Sept. 16-18 at 4 p.m., Pyle Center.

Hunt is president of the American Historical Association and Eugen Weber Professor of History at UCLA. She is widely recognized as the leading American historian of revolutionary France, but she is also well known for her contributions to historiographic debate and for helping to create the “new cultural history.”

Hunt’s Curti lectures grow out of her recent research on the ideology of human rights. These lectures are devoted to the “why” of human rights. Although human rights have a long legal and political history in the Western world, the conception of human rights first took its modern shape in the 18th century under the impact of the American and French revolutions. Rights had to be “declared” to be effective political tools.

Hunt’s lectures are entitled “The Revolutionary Origins of Human Rights,” Monday, Sept. 16; “Suffering and Rights: New Conceptions of the Body,” Tuesday, Sept. 17; and “The Psychology of Rights: New Conceptions of the Self,” Wednesday, Sept. 18.

For more information, call 263-1828.