Margaret R. Hunt

Fellow, SCAS.
Senior Professor of History, Uppsala University

Margaret Hunt works on gender studies and early modern British, British imperial and global history.
She studied music at Harvard College, theology at Harvard Divinity School, and history at New York
University, and then moved to Amherst College where she taught for around twenty-five years. In
2013, she took up a professorship at the Department of History of Uppsala University.

Hunt has written several books and numerous essays on early modern British, European, West Asian,
and South Asian history, dealing with such topics as class formation, marital relations, the fiscal-military
state, the comparative history of Islamic and Christian legal regimes, Sufism, travel narratives, the
history of temporality, and animal/human relations. Her most recent book was a co-edited collection (with
Philip Stern) of primary documents and historical commentary entitled The English East India Company
at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay (2016). In 2018, in
collaboration with Leos Müller of Stockholm University, she was awarded a Swedish Research Council
grant for a project to study knowledge acquisition and global networks among Scandinavian sailors and
travellers in the early modern period. They are using ships’ papers and personal correspondence seren-
dipitously seized from Scandinavian ships by the British Navy and privateers in the period 1660–1820.

While at SCAS, Hunt plans to finish a book that follows the career of one seventeenth-century English
East India Company ship and its crew, while also paying attention to contemporary political, economic,
and cultural developments in England, South Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the West Indies. 


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2021-22.