Biography

Diana Sorensen is James F. Rothenberg Research 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 writings 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. 

Project Summary

This project explores the specific nature of the intellectual sociability that flourished around Bernard Berenson and a group of expatriate writers, art historians, historians and cultural figures between the late nineteenth and the first few decades of the twentieth centuries.  The remarkable convergence of talent, creativity and friendship was made possible by material and symbolic forms of experience that she will analyze, unpack, and describe, seeking to delineate what made it different, what were its conditions of possibility, and how it came to an end.  The project would fall within the parameters of cultural history, but it pays special attention to the intersection between material and symbolic conditions, looking at how they enabled the cultural production and forms of sociability of this particular moment and group.  Case studies offer the specific, defining characteristics that bolster the claim that there is a difference worth studying here.  One of the main differences to explore in this group ("BB and Friends"), compared to the intellectual sociability in today's academy, is its informality and lack of institutionalized forms.  Here we have friends that travel a great deal and visit each other at villas whose convening function has been superseded nowadays by the university or college campus. Fluid, loosely defined networks of sociability obtained around the dinner table, gardens, and motorcars.  How did this social and cultural formation operate, how did it flourish and come to an end?