Directory of Research and Expertise

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Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Law

Research keywords:

Law & Humanities

Summary of research interests and expertise:

Anat Rosenberg’s research uses multidisciplinary methods in Law and the Humanities, including law & history, law & literature, law & visuality, and law & materiality, to study modern capitalism, liberalism and media. 

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
22-Sep-2022	The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment, and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity Monographs This book is a first cultural legal history of advertising in Britain, tracing the rise of mass advertising circa 1840–1914 and its legal shaping. The emergence of this new system disrupted the perceived foundations of modernity. The idea that culture was organized by identifiable fields of knowledge, experience, and authority came under strain as advertisers claimed to share values with the era’s most prominent fields, including news, art, science, and religiously inflected morality. While cultural boundaries grew blurry, the assumption that the world was becoming progressively disenchanted, itself closely related to concepts of boundaries, was undermined as enchanted experiences multiplied with the transformation of everyday environments by advertising. Non-rational ontologies and a play of mystery became apparent, involving possibilities for metamorphoses, magical efficacy, animated environments, affective connections between humans and things, imaginary worlds and fantasies that informed mundane lifed. These disrupted assumptions that the capitalist economy was a victory of reason. The Rise of Mass Advertising examines how contemporaries came to terms with the disruptive impact by mobilizing legal processes, powers, and concepts. Law was implicated in performing boundary work that preserved the modern sense of field distinctions. Advertising’s cultural meanings and its organization were shaped dialectically vis-à-vis other fields in a process that mainstreamed and legitimized it with legal means, but also construed it as an inferior simulation of the values of a progressive modernity, exhibiting epistemological shortfalls and aesthetic compromises that marked it apart from adjacent fields. The dual treatment meanwhile disavowed the central role of enchantment, in what amounted to a normative enterprise of disenchantment. One of the ironies of this enterprise was that it ultimately drove professional advertisers to embrace enchantment as their peculiar expertise.
23-Jan-2019	Liberalizing Contracts Nineteenth Century Promises Through Literature, Law and History In Liberalizing Contracts Anat Rosenberg examines nineteenth-century liberal thought in England, as developed through, and as it developed, the concept of contract, understood as the formal legal category of binding agreement, and the relations and human practices at which it gestured, most basically that of promise, most broadly the capitalist market order. She does so by placing canonical realist novels in conversation with legal-historical knowledge about Victorian contracts. Rosenberg argues that current understandings of the liberal effort in contracts need reconstructing from both ends of Henry Maine's famed aphorism, which described a historical progress "from status to contract." On the side of contract, historical accounts of its liberal content have been oscillating between atomism and social-collective approaches, missing out on forms of relationality in Victorian liberal conceptualizations of contracts which the book establishes in their complexity, richness, and wavering appeal. On the side of status, the expectation of a move "from status" has led to a split along the liberal/radical fault line among those assessing liberalism's historical commitment to promote mobility and equality. The split misses out on the possibility that liberalism functioned as a historical reinterpretation of statuses – particularly gender and class – rather than either an effort of their elimination or preservation. As Rosenberg shows, that reinterpretation effectively secured, yet also altered, gender and class hierarchies. There is no teleology to such an account.

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