Jordana Rosenberg received an MA and PhD from Cornell University, and a BA from
Wesleyan University. She is the recipient of an Ahmanson-Getty Fellowship from the Center
for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies at UCLA (2009- 2010), as well as a Marion
and Jasper Whiting Foundation Award, the Catherine Macaulay Prize, and a William Andrews
Clark Memorial Library Joint Fellowship Award. Professor Rosenberg's fields of
research and teaching include eighteenth-century transatlantic literature and poetry,
moral philosophy, political theory, early modern materialism, Marxism, and
secularization. 

Professor Rosenberg is the author of Critical Enthusiasm: Capital Accumulation and the
Transformation of Religious Passion. Critical Enthusiasm argues that the Atlantic world
of the long eighteenth century was characterized by two major, interrelated phenomena:
the onset of capital accumulation and the infusion of traditions of radical enthusiastic
rapture into Enlightenment discourses of aesthetics, jurisprudence, and political
philosophy. In exploring these cross-pollinations, Critical Enthusiasm shows that debates
around religious radicalism are bound to the advent of capitalism at its very root: as
legal precedent, as financial rhetoric, and as aesthetic form. As a result, Rosenberg
argues, we must not only contextualize histories of religion in terms of the economic
landscape of early modernity, but also recast the question of secularization in terms of
the contradictions of capitalism.

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The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's Belinda, English Literary History (2003)

Recent work in eighteenth-century studies has been notoriously preoccupied by what seem to be striking...