Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Website URL: https://www.ed.ac.uk/history-classics-archaeology/about-us/staff-profiles/profile_tab1_academic.php?uun=v1mhunt6&search=2

Keywords: African American civil rights, Hollywood representations of the American South, cultural history, religion in the American South, race, gender, civil rights pedagogy in the US and UK

About Me: I teach 20^th century American history, with a focus on issues of race, class, gender, and religion in the 1960s onwards.

My research focuses on the African American civil rights movement, and especially its portrayal in popular culture. I am particularly interested in the presentation of religion in civil rights cinema, and the implications this has for public memory of the movement. This research has led to published chapters on Selma, The Help, and Mississippi Burning.

I am currently engaged in a project that explores how Martin Luther King, Jr. is taught in British schools. This research contributes to a growing body of work about King as a global figure, and hopes to encourage a more detailed examination of Transatlantic exchange and solidarity during the long freedom struggle. A collaboration with colleagues from Newcastle and Northumbria Universities, this project has led to the publication of a free teaching resource pack, and is being developed for a scholarly article.

I am also exploring a short, but fascinating period of history in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights campaigns of April 1963. This project draws together various events occurring alongside each other, most notably, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s ‘Project C’ and the Alabama premiere of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Recent Publications: Chapters & Articles:

Hunt, M, ‘Hollywood’s southern strategy: portraying white Christianity in late-twentieth century civil rights melodramas.’ Chapter in Modern Films and the Historical South, Bryan Jack (ed.), University Press of Kentucky, forthcoming Fall 2018.

Hunt, M, ‘”Men and women of God and goodwill everywhere”: Selma and the role of religion in civil rights filmmaking.’ Chapter in The Shadow of Selma: The Selma Campaign and the Voting Rights Act, 1965-2015, Joe Street & Henry Knight Lozano (eds.), University Press of Florida, 2018.

Hunt, M, ‘”Fictional others”: analyzing Hollywood’s relationship with evangelical Christianity,’ Journal of American Studies, Vol. 51, Iss. 1 (Feb. 2017), pp. 241-8. Contribution to ‘Getting Religion: A Forum on the Study of Religion and the US.’

Hunt, M, “Segregation as southern anomaly: The Help and Hollywood’s deflection of American racism.” Chapter in Like One of the Family: Domestic Workers, Race and In/Visibility in The Help, Fiona Mills (ed.) Cambridge Scholars, 2016.

Book Reviews:

Charles Cobb, Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016) in History: The Journal of the Historical Society, Vol. 102, Iss. 349 (2017), pp. 172-3.