This year's I Tatti Council Lecture, "Culture in Arcadia: Bernard Berenson and Friends", was given by Professor Diana Sorensen (Harvard University) on April 3, 2025.
Around the end of the nineteenth century, when American universities were consolidating their professional institutions with departments, graduate programs, faculty salaries and systems of evaluation, a group of Anglo-American expatriates gathered in the hills around Florence, creating an informal kind of intellectual sociability that seemed unconstrained by modernizing structures. The talk will explore the relationship between this aesthetic colony and the practical and material conditions in which its members wrote important books, advanced the design of villas and their gardens, created and transplanted art collections, made friends and enemies –while sometimes facing the precarity of fashioning lives free of institutional frameworks..
Diana Sorensen is James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and of Comparative Literature. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2001, she taught at Columbia and Wesleyan Universities. She is a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth- centuries Latin American literature, and in comparative literature. 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, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Cultural Scenes from the Latin American Sixties, and Territories and Trajectories: Cultures in Circulation. She was Visiting Professor at I Tatti in 2010/2011 and again in 2021.