Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is 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 six- volume Cultural History of Ideas (2022), which was recently named the best Humanities reference work of the year by the Association of American Publishers.  Her work has been translated into many languages and supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton), the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. 

She was previously on the History faculty at Yale University and the University of Virginia and has held visiting professorships at the University of Virginia School of Law 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  Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government.  Her current book project, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press next winter.  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.