Sophia Rosenfeld, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, recently received the István Hont Book Prize from the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She was honored for her book, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025). The annual award recognizes the year’s best book published in intellectual history.
Dr. Rosenfeld’s award-winning monograph explores how, between the seventeenth century and the present, the idea and practice of making choices from menus of options came to shape so many aspects of our existences, from consumer culture to human rights, and with what consequences.
Dr. Rosenfeld has been a Penn faculty member since 2017. She previously chaired the university’s department of history, where she currently teaches courses on 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 several books, including Democracy and Truth: A Short History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard University Press, 2011).
A summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University, Dr. Rosenfeld earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University. Before coming to Penn, she taught at Yale University and the University of Virginia.