Professor Sophia Rosenfeld, new chair of the History Department, University of Pennsylvania

Sophie Rosenfeld's headshot

Professor Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, will serve as Chair of the History Department from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2025.  At Penn, Prof. Rosenfeld teaches European 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 A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2001); Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard, 2011); and Democracy and Truth: A Short History (Penn Press, 2019).  She is currently writing a book, to be published by Princeton University Press, on how the idea and practice of making choices from menus of options became so central to modern conceptions of freedom.  She served a three-year term from 2018 to 2021 as Vice President, in charge of the Research Division, of the American Historical Association.  In fall 2022, she will be on research leave as the holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the Library of Congress.