Diana Sorensen Views

General Goods

Diana Sorensen is Dean of Arts and Humanities, and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and of Comparative Literature. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2001, she worked at Columbia and Wesleyan Universities. She is a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth- centuries Latin American Literature, with additional expertise in cultural theory and gender theory. Among her varied writings on Latin American Literature are the following books: The Reader and the Text. Interpretative Strategies for Latin American Literatures, Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture (winner of the MLA Prize for the best book in the field in 1996), Sarmiento: Annotated Edition of his Works. She was just awarded a 2008 Cabot Fellowship for her most recent book, released in August 2007: A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Cultural Scenes from the Latin American Sixties.

The 2000 election of Vicente Fox as president of Mexico marked the end of a 71-year reign by the incumbent party, the PRI. While political observers have sought to understand the immediate significance of his election, Spanish Professor Diana Sorensen said Fox's election is the culmination of decades of political transformation in Latin America.

Growing up in Buenos Aires, Diana Sorensen led a double life. “I attended a bilingual school where we did an entire English curriculum in the morning and then, after lunch, took on new identities as Argentine students: we read a different syllabus in history; studied a different form of mathematics; and learned to divide shillings and pounds and pennies first and then wrestled with inflation-invested pesos in the afternoon.” These contrasting global views gave Sorensen early on “a very strong sense of approaching the world and its problems through different languages.”