Anat Rosenberg
My research brings together law, literature, sociology and cultural studies, to study the history of late modern capitalism. I am currently at work on a history of consumer capitalism, focused on consumer credit and advertising law, in 1860-1914 England. I am a lecturer at law. During 2017-18 I will be a visiting scholar at the Faculty of History, the University of Cambridge, and a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the University of London.
Subjects: History, Law, Literature
Biography
My book, "Liberalizing Contracts: Nineteenth Century Promises Through Literature, Law and History", examines Victorian liberalism in contracts by placing canonical realist novels in conversation with legal-historical knowledge about Victorian contracts.My current project, provisionally entitled "Judging Appearances" is a cultural legal history of consumer capitalism in England, 1860-1914. My dual focus is consumer credit and advertising, two areas which shaped consumer demand. The driving interest of this history is the legal treatment of appearances that persons pursue through consumption, a question drawing on theories of fashion, consumerism, and the role of images and surfaces in the epistemology of capitalism – and one raised by both credit and advertising.
I have been co-organizing IDC's Law & Humanities researchers workshop, and co-teaching a theories workshop, "Law Matters," and a workshop dealing with social tensions at the intersections of economy and intimacy, "Love and Prejudice in Law." I also teach Evidence Law and an Introduction to Law and Culture, and supervise legal clinics dealing with disability.
Education
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PhD., Tel Aviv University 2011
Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
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Legal history; liberalism; contracts; consumption; the history of capitalism; The Victorian and fin de siècle novel in England; law and art.
Websites
Books
Articles
How to Do Things with Law and Literature (in Israel) (in Hebrew)
Published: Jul 02, 2017 by The Nili Cohen Book (Shai Lavi & Ofer Grosskopf eds., 2017)
Authors: Anat Rosenberg
Subjects:
Literature, Law
This article reviews the field of Law and Literature in Israel (work dealing with Israeli law or published in Hebrew). It offers a conceptual and historical account of of the field's achievements and challenges.
Arts and the Aesthetic in Legal History
Published: Jul 02, 2017 by 2 Critical Analysis of Law 314 (2015)
Authors: Roy Kreitner, Anat Rosenberg, and Christopher Tomlins
Subjects:
History, Literature, Law
This is an introduction to a special issue of Critical Analysis of Law on the intersections of arts and legal history. We reflect on some of the benefits and implications of this interdisciplinary juncture, which contemporary legal historians have been slow to engage. The arts, we argue, prove vital in tackling and breaching the limits of imagination imposed by our time and place — disciplinary place included.
The Realism of the Balance Sheet: Value Assessments Between the Debtors Act and
Published: Jul 02, 2017 by 2 Critical Analysis of Law 363 (2015).
Authors: Anat Rosenberg
Subjects:
History, Literature, Law
This essay examines English parliamentary debates about consumers’ financial means in the context of the 1869 Debtors Act. Debates reveal a shift in financial epistemology, from a view of means based on social credit, to a view of means based on a balance sheet paradigm. The rise and naturalization of the balance-sheet paradigm was interrogated and challenged by one of the era’s most controversial texts, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The History of Genres: Reaching for Reality in Law and Literature
Published: Jul 02, 2017 by The History of Genres: Reaching for Reality in Law and Literature
Authors: Anat Rosenberg
Subjects:
History, Literature, Law
Genres are historical formations; their ability to generate knowledge depends on their interrelationships within a culture. Since law, too, can be viewed as a genre, studies of specific historical relationalities between law and other genres are necessary for law’s own history and theory. This essay discusses differentiations between Victorian law and literature.
Liberal Anguish: Wuthering Heights and the Structures of Liberal Thought
Published: Jul 02, 2017 by 69 Nineteenth Century Literature 1 (2014)
Authors: Anat Rosenberg
Subjects:
History, Literature, Philosophy
After decades of sustained academic critiques along established lines, liberalism has recently attracted renewed evaluations. These readings treat complexity as inherent in liberalism, and proceed to explore its structures beyond suspicious hermeneutics. This essay argues that Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) constitutes an early and sophisticated argument about the structures of complexity in liberalism.
Rational Households: Consumption Between Love and Hate
Published: Jul 02, 2017 by Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law (forthcoming)
Authors: Anat Rosenberg
Subjects:
History, Law
Western culture is both attached to consumption, and suspects its own pursuits. This article suggests that law has had an important role in this paradoxical experience. It offers a case study of the modernization of consumption through law, focusing on the common law doctrine of necessaries which regulated the consumer credit of married women, and by implication household consumption.