Laura J. Rosenthal

Laura J. Rosenthal writes about Restoration and eighteenth-century literature and culture, with particular interests in theater, the novel, gender, sexuality, imperialism, and the history of emotion.  Her most recent book is Ways of the World: Theater and Cosmopolitanism in the Restoration and Beyond (Cornell, 2020).  Ways of the World reinterprets Restoration and post-Restoration drama as centered on two intertwined projects: imperialism (including the slave trade) and elite ambitions to achieve the cultural sophistication of other contemporary empires (Ottoman, French, Dutch, Spanish).  Sometimes the stage supported these ambitions, but other times it confronted the cruelty, violence, and embarrassment of this drive that nevertheless planted the seeds of the British Empire.  Rosenthal is currently working on a new project tentatively titled “Savage Indignation: The Enlightenment History of a Political Emotion.”

Professor Rosenthal is also the author of Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cornell, 2006), which shows how representations of sex work reveal as much about work and emotion as they do about sex in novels (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding); scandal narratives (whore biographies, pornography); travel narratives; and reformist writing.  Prostitute narratives capture the alienation and self-division of identity in early capitalism.  Most major novelists of the period at one point found meaning in the story of a prostitute not simply (or event at all) as negative examples of ideal womanhood, but rather as figures with which readers were invited to identify.  In 2008, Rosenthal published some of the lesser known examples of the genre in Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century (Broadview).

Rosenthal's first book was Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern Drama: Gender, Authorship, Literature Property (Cornell, 1996), which explores the importance of women playwrights, 1650-1740, and the impact of new cultures of property on dramatic authorship.  She has also co-edited two collections of essays: one with Donna Weiland called Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment (Teagle Foundation, 2011) and on with Mita Choudhury) of Monstruous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment (Bucknell, 2002). She won a Newberry/British Academy Award for Research in Great Britain; the Monticello College Foundation Fellowship for study at the Newberry Library; an NEH Summer Award; and a Folger Shakespeare Library Short-Term Fellowship. She has recently served as the ADVANC Professor for the College of Arts and Humanities. She currently serves as the Director for Faculty Leadership and Development in the Office of Faculty Affairs and as editor of the journal Restoration: Studies in Literature and Culture.