Department of English
- Monday, September 15, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
The next meeting of Penn's Workshop in the History of Material Texts will be Monday, September 15, at 5:15 PM Eastern time. We will convene in the Class of 1978 Pavilion, on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
On Monday, we are thrilled to welcome Sophia Rosenfeld (University of Pennsylvania), for a talk titled “The Age of Choice Technology.”
Professor Rosenfeld writes:
“In this talk, I will introduce some of the main arguments and themes of my recent book, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. Mainly, though, I will consider the material foundations of The Age of Choice. That is, I will explore—as both source and key part of the story—a variety of micro-technologies dependent on paper, from sales catalogues to commonplace books to dance cards to election ballots, all of which were designed to facilitate the performance of choice-making across various domains. Penn’s own sample of the menu of the French restauranteur Beauvilliers (c. 1800) will be the starting point.”
Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and former 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 A 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 most recent book is The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton, 2025), which has recently been named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and shortlisted for the Cundill Prize.