Professor Anat Rosenberg
Additional Information
Anat Rosenberg is Professor of Law and the Humanities at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, where she leads the Law and Humanities Hub (LHub).
Anat graduated with her LLB magna cum laude from Hebrew University and received her PhD in 2011 from Tel Aviv University. Before joining IALS she was an Associate Professor at Reichman University. She has been a visitor at EHESS – École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (2024), the University of Cambridge (2017-2020), IALS (2017-2019), and Columbia University (2006-2007). She is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; and co-founder of the Research Network on Enchantment in the History of Capitalism.
Anat studies the history of modern capitalism, liberalism, and media, drawing on multidisciplinary methods in Law and the Humanities, including law and visuality, law and materiality, and law and literature. Her recent book addresses the cultural legal history of advertising in Britain c. 1840-1914. Her forthcoming projects include a co-edited special issue on enchantment in the history of capitalism; a contemporary history of affective propaganda and law in the attempted regime overhaul in Israel, which has been awarded an ISF research grant; and what she hopes will be a book-length transnational cultural legal history of propaganda.
Anat welcomes proposals for the supervision of PhD students in her areas of expertise.
Selected publications
Books
- The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment, and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022) (open access) (the Economic History Association of Israel Kleiman Prize for best book).
- Liberalizing Contracts: Nineteenth Century Promises Through Literature, Law and History (Routledge, 2018).
Edited Special Issues
- Law and the Material Turn, special issue of Law, Society and Culture (2024) (co-edited with Leora Bilsky) (Hebrew).
- Arts and the Aesthetic in Legal History, special issue of Critical Analysis of Law (2015) (co-edited with Roy Kreitner and Christopher Tomlins).
Selected articles
- “Fears of Enchantment: Oliver Onions’ Good Boy Seldom and the Making of an Advertising Myth,” 12 Cultural History (2023), 44-73.
- “Ways of Seeing Advertising: Law and the Making of Visual Commercial Culture,” 48 Law & Social Inquiry (2021), 130-174 (open access) (Richard Stein essay prize for excellence in interdisciplinary scholarship, 2022, by the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Organization; Israel Law & Society Association best article prize 2023).
- “Legal Ridicule in the Age of Advertisement: Puffery, Quackery and the Mass Market,” 61 American Journal of Legal History (2021), 281–307. Discussed on the Contracts Professors blog
- “Exaggeration: Advertising, Law and Medical Quackery in Britain, c. 1840-1914,” 42 The Journal of Legal History (2021), 202-231.
- “‘Amongst the Most Desirable Reading’: Advertising and the Fetters of the Newspaper Press, Britain c. 1848-1914,” 37 Law and History Review (2019), 657-706 (Israel’s History & Law Association best article award, 2019).
- “What Do Contracts Histories Tell Us About Capitalism? From Origins and Distribution, to the Body and the Nation," in The Oxford Handbook of Legal History (Markus Dubber & Christopher Tomlins eds., 2018), 1-26.
- "The Realism of the Balance Sheet: Value Assessments Between the Debtors Act and The Picture of Dorian Gray," 2 Critical Analysis of Law (2015), 363-382.
- "Entanglements: A Study of Liberal Thought in the Promise of Marriage," 20 Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender (2014), 371-404 (selected for the 2013 Israeli Junior Faculty Forum).
- "Contract’s Meaning and the Histories of Classical Contract Law," 59 McGill Law Journal (2013), 165-207.
- "Separate Spheres Revisited: On the Frameworks of Interdisciplinarity and Constructions of the Market," 24 Law & Literature (2012), 393-429.
Recent media & outreach
- “The Reading List: Advertising,” History Today (2024).
- “Key points: The Argumentative Structures Utilized by Supporters of the Regime Overhaul,” The Israeli Law Professors’ Forum for Democracy (2023) (with Eliav Lieblich and Tomer Shadmy) (popular illustrated version).
- Media project, (2023).The Israeli Law Professors’ Forum for Democracy: The Judicial Nominations Committee
- Media project, The Israeli Law Professors’ Forum for Democracy: Democracy’s Red Lines (2023).
- Musical production, historical songs about and as advertisements: The Borax Pet by Edward Sabine; John Peel by Beecham; Complaints: The Ills of Life and Their Remedies, by Edward Terry – performed by Dima Schechter and Elena Lidovskaya (2023).
- Law and Advertising Creative Workshop, Tel Aviv, TA Tarbut, co-organized with creative specialist Libby Tishler (2022).
- Kristof Smeyers in conversation with Anat Rosenberg, Enchantment in the History of Capitalism podcast (2022).