Doris Sommer is the Ira and Jewell Williams Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where she is Founder and Director of Cultural Agents: Arts and Humanities in Civic Engagement. She is the author of The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities, Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education and editor of Cultural Agency in the Americas.