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Anna Rosensweig

  • Associate Professor of French and Visual and Cultural Studies
  • Director, Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies

PhD, University of Minnesota

Office Location
508 Morey Hall
Telephone
(585) 275-9249

Office Hours: By appointment only

Biography

Rosensweig’s scholarship and teaching focus on early modern literature and culture, the intersections of literature and political theory, and performance studies. Her first book, Subjects of Affection: Rights of Resistance on the Early Modern French Stage (Northwestern University Press 2022) offers an alternative to the modern model of human rights in an unexpected archive: the monarchist tragedies that shaped Louis XIV’s absolutist France. Pairing political theory with performance studies, Anna Rosensweig argues that the right of resistance, largely thought to have disappeared from French political thought in the aftermath of the religious wars of the sixteenth century, actually endured throughout the seventeenth century as a conceptual framework embedded and embodied in tragic drama.

She is currently working on two book projects. The first builds on Subjects of Affection to examine how members of the political Right in the United States—including insurrectionists, antiabortion extremists, and adherents of the QAnon conspiracy—have mobilized theories of resistance from early modern Europe to justify their opposition to state and federal law. This work was recently profiled in the UR's News Center:

"Why is a 16th-century tradition attracting activists on the Christian right?"

Rosensweig's other book project, Like a Public Fountain, investigates how early modern texts and performances aligned royal bodies with elements of urban architecture, such as roads, bridges, and fountains.

Research Overview

Cover of the book Subjects of Affections with

Research Interests

  • Early modern French literature and culture
  • Theater and performance studies
  • Political theory

Courses Offered (subject to change)

  • AHST 583:  VCS Colloquium (Fall 2022)
  • CLTR 389 :  MLC Research Seminar (Fall 2018)
  • FREN 202:  Introduction to Literature in French (Spring 2017)
  • FREN 204:  Contemporary French Culture (Fall 2022)
  • FREN 227:  Laughing Matters: Comedy in Early Modern France (Spring 2021)
  • FREN 237:  Performance Studies (Spring 2022)
  • FREN 244:  Crimes of Passion: Love and Death on the Classical French Stage (Spring 2022)
  • FREN 257:  Sex, Lies, and Secrets: Libertinism in Early Modern France (Spring 2023)
  • FREN 292:  French Feminisms (Spring 2021)
  • FREN 294:  Queer Theory (Fall 2021)

Selected Publications

Books

Articles

Honors and Activities

  • Co-organizer, Early Modern French Studies Reading Group, MLA Commons, 2012-present
  • Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities, Department of French and Italian, University of Southern California, 2014-2016
  • Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Washington, DC, 2013-2014