Reading wollstonecraft's Rights of Men as a source for the british post-apocalyptic imagination

NEH Scholarly Editions PI Eileen Hunt (Notre Dame, Political Science) co-organized with Duncan Bell (Cambridge, Politics and International Relations) a book workshop on 'Political Theory and Speculative Fiction' at Jesus College, Cambridge University, on 29-30 August 2025. She presented research based on her NEH project, a standard edition of Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men, showing how Wollstonecraft developed an influential thought experiment—about world politics 'after London' inevitably became a ruin in the future—in her 1790 reply to Burke's Reflections. Hunt argued that this 'After London' thought experiment became the basis of the 'tropography' of the British post-apocalyptic imagination from her daughter Mary Shelley's 1826 global pandemic novel The Last Man to the 2016 zombie plague film 'Pride + Prejudice + Zombies' (which explicitly returns the themes of British post-apocalyptic thought to the Burke-Wollstonecraft debate of 1790). Bell and Hunt plan to co-edit a volume based on the proceedings of the two-day workshop, which featured talks from political theorists, philosophers, historians, and writers of science fiction. [For the full program, see below]. The workshop was free and open to the university community, attracting scholars, postdocs, and graduate students from fields ranging from computer science to art history.