Doris Sommer

Doris Sommer is the Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She founded the Cultural Agents Initiative, an NGO dedicated to civic engagement through the humanities. Her work focuses on arts-based education, public policy, and global development. She holds a B.A. from Douglass College and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University.

• Affiliations: Cultural Agents Initiative, Harvard University; Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish.
• Initiatives: Pre-Texts program (arts-based literacy training), Arts and Policy Certificate.
• Research: Civic agency, public humanities, cultural policy, bilingual aesthetics, and Latin American literature.

Her influential books include The Work of Art in the World (2014) and Foundational Fictions (1991). She collaborates with global leaders like Antanas Mockus and Augusto Boal to integrate arts into civic life.