Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Miyako Yerick
The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
Featuring Penn Professor Sophia Rosenfeld and WCNCR Founding President Narges Zamani
Organized by Columbia Alumni of Washington DC
Sophia Rosenfeld
Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History
University of Pennsylvania
In conversation with:
Narges Zamani
Chief Investment Officer
Pactolus LLC
Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. But the option to choose in such matters was not something we always possessed or even aspired to. At the same time, we have been warned by everybody from marketing gurus to psychologists about the negative consequences stemming from our current obsession with choice. It turns out that not only are we not very good at realizing our personal desires, we are also overwhelmed with too many possibilities and anxious about what best to select. There are social costs too. How did all this happen? This conversation explores the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom.
Taking the audience from the seventeenth century to today, Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one’s convictions. Similarly, she traces the history of choice in romantic life, politics, and the ideals of human rights. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the lives of women, those often with the fewest choices, who have frequently been the drivers of this change. She concludes with an exploration of how reproductive rights have become a symbolic flashpoint in our contemporary struggles over the association of liberty with choice.
Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from novels and restaurant menus to the latest scientific findings about choice in psychology and economics, Rosenfeld urges us to rethink the meaning of choice and its promise and limitations in modern life.
Time will be allocated for Q&A.
Co-sponsored by Yale and Penn Clubs of Washington DC
"This is a book of astonishing insight by one of America’s most talented historians. Rosenfeld has that rare capacity to remove scales from our eyes and compel us to confront what we had failed to see. Readers will have no choice but to be enthralled." Darrin M. McMahon, author of Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea
Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches intellectual and cultural history with an emphasis on the history of democracy since the 18th century. She is the author of a number of books, including Common Sense: A Political History (2011), which won the Mark Lynton History Prize and the SHEAR Book Prize, and Truth and Democracy: A Short History (2019), as well as co-editor of a six-volume Cultural History of Ideas (2022) covering antiquity to the present. She also continues to write essays and reviews in outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation on the state of democracy and the challenges of free speech now.
Rosenfeld was educated at Princeton (BA) and Havard (PhD) and was previously on the History faculty at UVA and at Yale. Her work has been translated into many languages and supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton), the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2022, she held the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the Library of Congress and was also named Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government.
Narges Zamani serves as Chief Investment Officer for Pactolus LLC, delivering integrated investment management expertise to select family offices. She oversees the diligence, negotiation, and execution of private investment opportunities as well as client asset allocation and portfolio management, investment manager selection, and client portfolio performance reviews.
Prior to that, Zamani was the Managing Director of the George Washington University Endowment, responsible for implementing a comprehensive risk management framework across all asset classes that identifies risk-reward tradeoffs and is part of the overall decision-making process. She has over 18 years of investment experience in emerging markets. Prior to joining GW, Zamani served as a Managing Director at Alfa Capital Partner, as part of the divestment team of the AIG Asian Infrastructure Fund at Emerging Markets Partnership (now EMP Global) and client relations at JP Morgan in London. She began her career in project finance at The Bank of Tokyo in Tokyo.
Zamani earned a Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) in finance from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of International Studies from The Lauder Institute of Management and a BSc Honors in Biology from Queens University, Canada. She holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation and is a member of the CFA Institute and the CFA Society of Washington, DC along with a Professional Risk Management, (PRM). She participates on the Investment Committee for POB Capital Fund I, a real estate fund.
