Daniel Rosenberg

Daniel Rosenberg is an intellectual historian specializing in questions of historical representation. His research focuses on eighteenth-century France and Britain and ranges broadly in areas including the history of language, philosophy, and art.

Rosenberg's book, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, written with Anthony Grafton (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) has garnered enthusiastic praise from The New York Times ("eye-popping…my vote for the most beautiful book of the year"), The New Republic ("a fascinating narrative…a feeling for the poetic powers of material culture, for the way that stylistic evolutions express changing worldviews"), Imago Mundi ("a wondrous point of reference for the study of graphic reason"), Journal of Visual Culture ("profoundly knowledgeable"), Make  ("artful and enlightening"), Bookforum ("scholarly yet spirited"), Choice ("immensely interesting"), the Times Higher Education Supplement  ("exceptional…beautifully produced…a foundational text for future serious study of chronographics"), the Barnes and Noble Review ("a visually and intellectually arresting exhibition of ingenuity, invention, and sometimes eccentricity"), Fine Books ("for map collectors, history buffs, and the terminally bookish, Cartographies is a very special find"), and Grafik  ("enthralling…informative and concise"). On the web, the book has been recommended by  Kottke, Bookslut, Coolhunting, and many others.

Cartographies of Time was named to the Best Books of the Year 2010 by amazon.com and ranked #2 on their list of Best Books of the Year in Art and Photography 2010; it was also named to the 2010 list of the Year’s Best Reading Beyond Category by The Barnes and Noble Review.The exhibition based on the book at the Princeton University Art Museum has also received wide acclaim including a Critic's Pick in ArtForum, which referred to the exhibition and book as a "dramatic" expansion of our "knowledge of visual phenomena."

Rosenberg's work has appeared in many journals including Representations, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques; Journal of the History of Ideas; Eighteenth-Century Studies; Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture; Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century; Art Journal; Esse; and Urban China. His work has also been anthologized in numerous academic books including Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language; Postmodernism and the Enlightenment; Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital; and In(ter)discipline: New Languages for Criticism. His volume Histories of the Future (Duke University Press, 2005), edited with anthropologist Susan Harding, was lauded by the Times Literary Supplement as "effervescent, exhilarated, and stimulating." 

He is also editor-at-large of Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture, where he is a frequent contributor. Rosenberg's essays on paleolithic calendars, the concept of sloth, the history of Jell-O, the invention of hypertext, and the language of the planet Mars as well as his Timeline of Timelines, can all be found there. Several of Rosenberg's essays are anthologized in Cabinet's Ten Year retrospective volume, Curiosity and Method.

Rosenberg has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Rutgers Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, University of California Humanities Research Institute, Princeton University Council of the Humanities, among others. He served as Associate Dean of the Clark Honors College from 2011-13. He is Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. Professor Rosenberg’s current research focuses on the history of data.