Sophia Rosenfeld
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Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her latest book is The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World (2025). She is also the author of A Revolution in Language (2001); Common Sense: A Political History (2011), which won the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Society for the History of the Early Republic Book Prize; and Truth and Democracy: A Short History (2019), as well as co-editor of the award-winning, six-volume Cultural History of Ideas (2022) and a former co-editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History. Her work has been translated into many languages and supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton), the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts and Remarque Institute, as well as visiting professorships at the UVA Law School and the EHESS in Paris. In 2022, she held the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the Library of Congress and was also named an Officer in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government. She also continues to write and to speak in a wide variety of venues about the state of contemporary democracy and the challenges of free speech. Her essays and reviews on these subjects can be found in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation, among other outlets.
In June 2025, she joins the Paris IAS fr a one-monthe wirting residency.
Research topics
The intellectual and cultural history of the Age of Revolutions, the French Revolution and its aftermath, the Enlightenment, the history of democracy, the legacy of the 17th and 18th centuries for modernity
Revolutions and Anniversaries: J. Franklin Jameson, One Hundred Years Later
J. Franklin Jameson wrote one of the most important accounts of the origins of the American Revolution in 1926, the 150th anniversary of that revolution's start. One hundred years later, as the US prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, it is a good moment to reassess Jameson's understanding of the causes the American and French Revolutions. In the current moment, when they are under unusual threat, it seems especially important to consider the weight that Jameson gave to ways of thinking and feeling necessary for imagining democracy: what are they? how did they emerge? and, it is now important to ask, how and why have they withered?
Jameson, contrary to prevailing currents, gave considerable weight to the relationship between particular ways of thinking and feeling (as have thinkers as different as Tocqueville and Arendt at different moments) that have collectively worked to sustain experiments in democracy. At this moment of democratic backsliding and even crisis in many parts of the globe, Jameson provides a launching point for a wide-ranging exploration of the nature of these forms of thought and emotion and the question of not only the sources of their emergence but also the sources of their potential decline.
Key publications
The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (2025)
Democracy and Truth: A Short History (2019)
Common Sense: A Political History (2011)
A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (2001)
 Online conference by Sophia Rosenfeld, Chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, as part of the "Paris IAS Ideas" series |
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