Philippe Rosenberg

Philippe Rosenberg, Assistant Professor (BA, Concordia University, Montréal, Québec; Ph.D. (History), Duke University, 1999) early modern British and Irish history; early modern cultural history. Dissertation: “The Moral Order of Violence: the Meanings of Cruelty in early modern England, 1648-1685;” articles on early British antislavery ( William & Mary Quarterly, 2004) and on the ideology of punitive justice (2004).

My interests center on the ethical stances and moral commitments of early modern subjects. My first book, Negative Enlightenment: The Polemics of Brutality and the Cultivation of Restraint in the British Isles (1640-1700) (currently in completion), deals with the effects of a dramatic flare-up in complaints about atrocities and excessive violence that swept England during the seventeenth century. Many different strands of expression participated in this moment: sermons and the literature of martyrdom, military dispatches and murder ballads, political speeches and laments about prison conditions. Together they contributed to the emergence of a fragile culture of restraint destined to mesh with a set of stances marked by moderation as well as a nascent humanitarian sensibility. The mobilization of indignation, the production of propaganda, and the sensationalism of the British press, I argue, fit together as vectors of “enlightened” opinion that operated from within the world of the violent. In the coming months, I’ll be turning to a new, multi-stage, project that will examine the reciprocities between the moral values of the “British,” those of cultural mediators, and those of foreign subjects as part of the deepening international commitments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Note: because I will be on leave in 2010-11, no students focusing on early modern Britain will be accepted into the graduate program this year.

Curriculum Vitae