Bill Hunt is a native of Mechanicsville, Va. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Virginia and was awarded a Ph.D. from Duke University in May 2016. He has twice completed semesters of Arabic-language coursework at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan, and has worked at nonprofit organizations in Beirut, Lebanon; Washington, D.C.; and Richmond, Va. His thesis is titled “‘Suffragettes of the Harem’: The Evolution of Sympathy and the Afterlives of Sentimentality in American Feminist Orientalism, 1865-1920.” It examines how authors affiliated with the American Suffrage Movement wrote and thought about space identified as “harem,” specifically interrogating how these accounts understand sympathy and sentimentality as forces for the reform and cosmopolitanization of non-Western cultures.
