Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld, a scholar European and American intellectual and cultural history, will give the keynote address at the seventh annual Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium, to be held at Johns Hopkins University from March 19-21, 2026.
Her talk, entitled “Living in the Age of Choice,” will draw on her new book, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World (Princeton, 2025), which explores the ways in which choice-making — in everything from shopping and dining, to marriage and faith, to politics and human rights — emerged from the 17th century onward as a proxy for freedom.
Dr. Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and former chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a B.A. in History from Princeton and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, the Mellon Foundation, NYU, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris, and the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as visiting professorships at the University of Virginia School of Law and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Prior to arriving at Penn in January 2017, she was Professor of History at Yale University and, before that, the University of Virginia. She also served a three-year term as Vice President of the American Historical Association, where she was in charge of the Research Division. n 2022, she held the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the Library of Congress, and she was also named by the French government Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. In 2025, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In The Age of Choice, Rosenfeld argues that the invention of choice is the defining feature of modernism, and that it has largely been women — those with the fewest choices — who have catalyzed this change. The book is a finalist for the Cundill History Prize, and was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice.
Rosenfeld’s previous books include Democracy and Truth: A Short History (Penn Press, 2019), 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 A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2001). Her articles and essays have appeared in the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History, French Historical Studies, and the William and Mary Quarterly, as well as publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, and The Nation. From 2013 to 2017, she co-edited the journal Modern Intellectual History. In 2022, A Cultural History of Ideas, a six-volume book series covering antiquity to the present for which she was co-general editor with Peter Struck, appeared with Bloomsbury and won the Association of American Publishers’ award for best reference work in the humanities. Her writing has been or is being translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Hindi, Korean, and Chinese.
The Macksey Symposium keynote address will be held on Friday, March 20, from 5:00 to 6:15 pm on the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, and will be open to the public.
Dr. Rosenfeld will also sign books for conference attendees on Saturday, March 21, from 9:00 to 10:00 am in the Gilman Atrium.
Please see the symposium website for a full schedule of events.
Undergraduate students currently enrolled in any two- or four-year college or university in the U.S. are invited to apply to present their humanities research at the Macksey Symposium. Submissions are open through December 1, 2025. See the application instructions here.