Anna Rosensweig

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 2021) 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 second book, Like a Public Fountain, which investigates how early modern texts and performances aligned royal bodies with elements of urban architecture, such as roads, bridges, and fountains.