Sophia Rosenfeld
Sophia Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Rosenfeld 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 18th century for modern democracy.
She is the author of The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (2025), named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She has also authored A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (2001); Common Sense: A Political History (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 (2019). The 2022 six-volume series, A Cultural History of Ideas, which she co-edited with Peter Struck, won the Association of American Publishers’ award for best reference work in the humanities. Rosenfeld received her PhD from Harvard University.