Diana Sorensen

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Diana Sorensen is the dean of arts and humanities at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where she is also the James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and a professor of comparative literature. Her writing deals with the relationship between culture and society in a variety of ways, including how an individual reader engages with a text; how social groups have defined themselves as they debate the meanings of a classic; and how to understand the ways in which cultures are “made” in the intersections between material (social, economic, political) and symbolic processes. At the Radcliffe Institute, Sorensen will write about the intersections between space, materiality, and movement in what she sees as our current, transitional times. Her point of departure will be the conceptual models at work in our “geographic imaginaries”—the ways in which we map the globe in the process of organizing local and global knowledge. Working on the hunch that the area-studies model for studying geography in its broadest sense may no longer be the best model for mapping culture and knowledge, she will explore alternative ways of organizing the relationships between regimes of representation and regional configurations. Sorensen earned her BA from Universidad de Buenos Aires and her PhD from Columbia University and has received support from the Fulbright Program and Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. Her book Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture (University of Texas Press, 1996) won the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association.