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

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

• Subjects of Affection: Rights of Resistance on the Early Modern French Stage , Northwestern University Press, December 2021

Articles

• “Whose Resistance Theory?” Modern Language Quarterly 83.3 (2022): 335-348.
• “Civic Pride and Royal Incorporation: Henri IV in Limoges.” Early Modern French Studies 44.2 (2022): 124-137.
• An Affective Approach to Teaching French Neoclassical Tragedy.” MLA Options for Teaching French Neoclassical Tragedy. Eds. Hélène Bilis and Ellen McClure. The Modern Language Association of America (2021): 315–326. 
• "Closed Heart, Open Secret: Exposing Private Liberty in Corneille's Last Tragedy," Renaissance Drama 46.2 (2018): 231-252.
• "The Eye of Paris, the Eye of France: Capital Bodies in Claude Billard's La mort d’Henri IV." Paris, Imagined Capital:Economic Transition and Modernity (17th to 19th Centuries). Spec. issue of L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 55, no. 3, Fall 2015, pp. 15-28. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/esp.2015.0032.
• "'Toute la cité pleure': La mise en scène du peuple thébain dans Antigone ou la Piété de Robert Garnier." La Foule au théâtre, edited by Pascale Drouet and Françoise Dubor. Spec. issue of Cahiers FoReLL (Formes et Représentations en Linguistique et Littérature), Apr. 2015, 09.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/lescahiersforell/index.php?id=279.
• "Performing Off-Staged Violence in Rachilde's Drama." Visualizing Violence in Francophone Cultures, edited by Magali Compan, Cambridge Scholars, 2015, pp. 131-46.
• "Hearing Witness: Literary Listening as a Duty of Memory in Rwanda." French Review, vol. 86, no. 4, Mar. 2013, pp. 744-55.

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