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Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches European and American intellectual and cultural history with a special emphasis on the Enlightenment, the trans-Atlantic Age of Revolutions, and the legacy of the eighteenth century for modern democracy. She is the author of Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2001); Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard, 2011), which won the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Society for the History of the Early American Republic Book Prize; and Democracy and Truth: A Short History (Penn Press, 2019). Her articles and essays have appeared in leading scholarly journals, including the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History French Historical Studies, and the William and Mary Quarterly, as well as such outlets as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and, frequently, The Nation. From 2013 to 2017, she co-edited the journal Modern Intellectual History. In 2022, A Cultural History of Ideas, a 6 volume book series covering antiquity to the present for which she was co-general editor with Peter Struck (Penn, Classical Studies), appeared with Bloomsbury and won the Association of American Publishers’ award for best reference work in the humanities. Her writing has been or is being translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Korean, and Chinese.

Sophia's new book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life is forthcoming in February 2025. Her talk will be about both methods for writing the history of epistemology and the rise of new forms of choice-making, followed by sciences of choice, from the 18th century onward.

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