Laura J. Rosenthal is the author of Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cornell, 2006), which shows how representations of sex work reveal as much about work as they do about sex in novels (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding); scandal narratives (whore biographies, pornography); travel narratives; and reformist writing.
She is also author of Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern Drama: Gender, Authorship, Literature Property (Cornell, 1996); editor of Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century (Broadview, 2008); and co-editor (with Donna Heiland) of Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment (Teagle Foundation, 2011) and (with Mita Choudhury) of Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment (Bucknell, 2002). She won a Newberry/British Academy Award for Research in Great Britain; the Monticello College Foundation Fellowship for study at the Newberry Library; an NEH Summer Award; and a Folger Shakespeare Library Short-Term Fellowship. She is currently the ADVANCE Professor for the College of Arts and Humanities and writing a book about theater and cosmopolitanism, 1660-1760.
