About

Doris Sommer is the Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She serves as the Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard, where her academic and outreach work promotes development through arts and humanities. Sommer is particularly known for her leadership of the "Pre-Texts" program, an arts-based training initiative for teachers focused on literacy, critical thinking, and citizenship, which operates in Boston Public Schools, throughout Latin America, and beyond. Her scholarship explores the intersections of literature, culture, and civic engagement, with a focus on Latin America and bilingual aesthetics. Sommer's notable publications include Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991), which examines novels that helped consolidate new republics; Proceed with Caution when Engaged by Minority Literature (1999), which discusses a rhetoric of particularism; Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004); and The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (2014). Her work emphasizes the role of the humanities in public life and civic agency, highlighting both top-down political initiatives and grassroots cultural movements. Sommer holds a B.A. from Douglass College for Women in New Jersey and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University. She is also actively involved in various Harvard committees and editorial boards, reflecting her commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and public service.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Political Science
• Medicine
• Social psychology
• Law
• Psychotherapist
• Medical emergency
• Criminology
• Psychiatry
• Clinical psychology

Selected publications

• A single-arm pilot study to assess salivary metabolites in facilitators tested with Pre-Texts arts-literacy intervention

  The Arts in Psychotherapy · 2025-09-30

  articleOpen access

  The Pre-Texts arts-literacy intervention has demonstrated effectiveness for reducing depression and anxiety symptoms in adolescents. However, the biological mechanisms underlying these psychological changes remain largely unexplored. This single-arm pilot study investigated the impact of Pre-Texts training on salivary metabolite profiles in adults (N=10) undergoing facilitator training. Participants completed a 20-hour Pre-Texts program over four days, with saliva samples collected at baseline, during training (day 3), immediately post-intervention (day 4), and at 8-week follow-up. Flow injection analysis-tandem mass spectrometry quantified seven key metabolites linked to glutamate signaling (glutamic acid, glycine, valine, proline) and cellular metabolism/energy production (alanine, citrulline, C3 propionylcarnitine). Results demonstrated significant and sustained increases in glutamic acid, glycine, valine, proline, alanine, and citrulline, with concurrent decreases in C3 propionylcarnitine, versus baseline. These neurobiochemical changes were still present at follow-up, indicating the possibility of sustained effects on neurotransmission and cellular energetics. The observed metabolic shifts may reflect mechanisms involving NMDA receptor activation, neuroplasticity, cognitive flexibility, and stress response regulation. This preliminary investigation establishes methodological foundations for an expanded research examining the biological mechanisms underlying arts-based interventions, suggesting that Pre-Texts may foster neurometabolic changes that may be supportive of cognitive and emotional wellbeing. • Pre-Texts reduces depression and anxiety, although its biological basis is unclear. • Pre-Texts influences key metabolites linked to glutamate signaling and metabolism. • This pilot study identifies biomarkers that may guide future research on Pre-Texts

  PublisherDOI

• “I didn’t choose water. Water chose me”: India’s water crisis, graphic novel, and Sarnath Banerjee, an interview

  Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics · 2025-09-09

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Pre-Texts Protocol: Promoting Flourishing Through Collective Creative Engagement

  2025-09-01

  articleOpen access

  This paper examines the Pre-Texts protocol as an innovative educational intervention that operationalizes key principles of positive psychology to foster wellbeing and learning in diverse populations. Pre-Texts integrates collective reading, questioning, artistic creation, reflection, and associative thinking to create conditions for human flourishing aligned with Seligman’s (2011) PERMA model. Drawing on implementations across marginalized communities, we argue how the protocol’s synthesis of aesthetic education, critical pedagogy, and Montessori-inspired principles generates measurable improvements in both psychological wellbeing and cognitive development. The protocol's emphasis on collective creativity and non-competitive engagement provides an alternative to individualistic educational approaches, particularly benefiting vulnerable populations who face barriers to traditional mental health and educational resources. Through an analysis of the protocol’s theoretical foundations and empirical outcomes, we argue that Pre-Texts represents a significant advancement in understanding how creative, text-based interventions can promote mental health, social inclusion, and lifelong learning. The paper contributes to the positive psychology literature by demonstrating how relatively simple, low-cost interventions can create virtuous cycles of learning and wellbeing, offering a replicable model for fostering human flourishing across diverse cultural contexts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Doubt: On Sparring and Sociability

  Theory & Event · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: "What good are the humanities?" To practical people who ask this question, my answer will sound paradoxical: The humanities are good for training a taste for doubt. All research starts with doubt, but mostly to resolve it. Humanists don't care as much about answers as about the activity of thinking. They let doubt linger and invite interpretation, conversation, reflection, human contact. The humanities promote sociability and support democracy. If people don't enjoy talking together, hearing various opinions, and sparring sometimes for the sheer fun of it, democracy declines. When rationality and AI eliminate doubt, we become indifferent to differences of perspective, experience, and to each other.

  PublisherDOI

• Editorial: Boredom: the elephant in the room

  Frontiers in Sociology · 2024-07-05 · 1 citations

  editorialOpen access

  Boredom is the worst sin because it is the father of other sins…when people are bored, they commit sins. -Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil This Topic originated from our reading in press reports that cases of domestic violence spiked during the COVID-19 lockdowns (Porter et al, 2021;Uzobo and Ayinmoro, 2023). People who had spent swaths of each day apart, involved in productive activity (work, school), were suddenly forced together in their homes, with little or nothing gainful to do. A result, pandemic boredom, was posited as a cause (Sommer et al., 2021), an apparently intolerable stressor that incited violence from apparently mild-mannered (likely mostly male; Walby & Allen, 2004) people. The specifics of how and why were not described in the press, but the consequences were: physical or emotional harm, fear and dread in people (likely mostly female) captive to their domestic situations, places where they had formerly felt safest. The governments that forced this isolation seemed caught off guard, helpless to address these unexpected problems. This Topic, then, was conceived to inquire into boredom as a trigger of harmful social effects.But our focus on the dark side of boredom drew immediate protest. Boredom also, it was pointed out, leads to valued outcomes. It is particularly implicated in creative and artistic expression (Mann and Cadman, 2014;Gomez-Ramirez and Costa, 2017). A description, drawn from our past research interviews, of the beginnings of a renown artist's creative urges, summarizes this positive boredom dynamic:When I was ten years old…we were visit[ing] my two maiden aunts…going down their street, and although it was a relatively old street, all the houses on it looked the same. And-I can remember this as clear as day-I said to my mother, 'When I grow up, I'm going to be an architect, so that people won't have to live in houses that all look alike!'… I thought, "It's so boring. Everybody should have an interesting house, a different one.Boredom, another artist once told us, "[makes me] "look for the surprise, the alteration of the process that is slightly out of my control, thank goodness, and that keeps the whole thing alive." Two of our submissions offer theoretical framing of this topic. Sommer draws on philosophies of human development to investigate the link between boredom and violence; importantly, she suggests that violence and aesthetic activity can be considered alternative responses to boredom, and she argues that the latter, obviously preferred response could (should) be actively encouraged. If creative activities are outlets for boredom and therefore deter violence, then providing support for those activities of "symbolic violence" (art) might be granted by governments as a responsibility for harm-prevention.Levine conceptually maps the idea of boredom, in its negative and positive potentialities.Boredom, it turns out, is not a simple idea. He credits Seneca with first identifying the pattern in which busy life turns to idleness, combines with frustration, mingling self-dislike with feelings of confinement and drooping spirits, to yield to unsteadiness of mind, and jealousy of others' progress. Who or what is responsible (thus what can be done about it) varies with interpretations of the idea. Is boredom a problem in the mindset of the individual that can, given sufficient strength of will, be opted out of? Or does it follow inevitably from the design of human conditions imposed externally (e.g., from alienation from one's labor, as in Adorno, or from one's station in life, as in Virginia Woolf)? Is it moral failing (a choice of idleness when industriousness is viable, thus a sin, according to Baudelaire)? A religious failing (estrangement from God)? A physical disease (humors out of balance)? Then there are positive elements: The urge to flee boredom alerts us to the inadequacy of a current state and provides impetus to something else better. It can be a deserved critique; a thing can deserve the description "boring" and thus petition for variation. It can be revealing of an important truth (e.g., the temporariness of life). Perhaps it even encourages us to do things for the sake of it, rather than to have accomplished it, thus, to live more fully.Zeißig echoes Sommer's idea that boredom suggests a choice we can make between negative and positive alternatives, in the domain of learning; like Levine, she notes the complexity of the idea, and that different facets of its meaning suggest different impacts on children in school.Tempelaar and Niculescu argue, also, for a multifaceted concept of boredom and derive evidence of the need for such a conception from a detailed empirical study of university students. Other contributors address specific educational contexts. Vuyk, Montania, and Barrios study how boredom appears to affect talent development in mathematically capable students in Paraguay.Johnson, Nerima, Kahur, and Osborn measure curiosity among Kenyan adolescents. Xu reviews a monograph that examines the impacts of boredom in foreign language classrooms. Three pieces address the broader societal impacts of boredom. In an opinion piece, Ndetei, Nyamai, and Mutiso explore the effects of boredom across African contexts. Miranda-Galarza and Mayer-Foulkes describe responses to the Covid lockdown from people with disabilities in Mexico, documenting negative tendencies toward violence but also more positive outlets in art and activism. Torvisco, Wichrowska, and Pellerone conduct a textual analysis that mines Spanish newspaper reporting for insights into violence exercised by children against parents.Two final contributions focus directly on what to do about harmful boredom. Velasco argues that many common claims about boredom and what we know about it are false; we know much more, he says, than is usually claimed, thus the starting point for dealing with the boredom's negative effects is to confess its "myths." In a final piece, Talbert brings us full circle by casting the negative effects of boredom into the context of criminology, developing a restorative justice approach based on creativity that addresses the antecedents of boredom-incited crime.The broader subtext of our writing about pandemic boredom is that we humans appear to live in an uneasy relationship with ourselves. Being too much alone with ourselves disaffects us (Alberti, 2019;Hemberg et al, 2019). Pascal attributed "all of the unhappiness of men" to their inability to "stay quietly in their own chamber" (Pensées, 139; though he possibly confounds solitude and boredom-which can surely be achieved in crowds-it is the boredom that arises from solitude that seems most relevant to lockdowns designed to prevent crowds). There is hope, however, in his suggestion that we can learn "how to stay with pleasure at home." Literature offers positive models. Smilla, the creation of Danish author Peter Hoeg, describes solitude as the "light of grace." "I never close my door behind me," she says, "without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself."Together, these varied explorations illustrate both the complexity of the idea of boredom, and provide insights into the significance of it impacts. Perhaps they also offer clues about how we (men especially) might come to know and like ourselves better when are forced to stay alone (or nearly so) in our chambers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Bored and spoiling for a flight: capabilities lost and found in lockdown

  Frontiers in Sociology · 2023-11-28

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Human beings are dynamic; our innate faculties beg to engage in activities. To achieve fullness and human dignity, people "convert" personal capabilities into active "functionings," Amartya Sen explains. This means that staying still is not a normal state. It can feel like punishment. Forced inactivity will generate resentment, resistance, and boredom that can fester until pent-up energy explodes violently, or implodes in depression. Boredom defaults on capabilities and resources in many cases. In other cases, stillness is a gift. It can stimulate the imagination to fill in emptiness with memories and new explorations. Either boredom builds toward doing damage, or it releases energy to think and to create. What people don't do is stay put, mentally or physically. Authorities-including police, judges, teachers, parents -should take this dynamic human condition into account and reconsider the effects of conventional command and control policies. Then they can choose between violence and creativity as alternative outlets for the energy that boredom generates. Short of facing up to human dynamism, decision-making may continue to favor strong-arm tactics, which trigger the violence and pain that policing is meant to mitigate. Is it surprising that apparently peaceful peoplebecome enraged in lockdown conditions? Do adults wonder why students drop-out of school and suffer escalating rates of depression and suicide? Boredom is certainly not the only cause for these disastrous effects, but to ignore it risks remaining complicit with processes that perpetuate personal and collective dysfunctions. Complicity with harmful practices will miss opportunities to channel frustrated energy toward developing human capabilities. Authorities are responsible for promoting peaceful development. We are all responsible.[2] Normally, people stay busy with routine activities. We work, play, attend to family and to friends. Particular activities have even become our public badges of identity, as is evident in surnames (Cooper, Baker, Taylor, Farmer, etc.) that trace back to work that ancestors answered to. Lockdown during COVID-19 meant that many otherwise occupied people had few outlets for energy. Those who knew how to meditate managed to assuage anxiety through contemplation and the pursuit of ideal emptiness.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An arts-literacy intervention for adolescent depression and anxiety symptoms: outcomes of a randomised controlled trial of Pre-Texts with Kenyan adolescents

  EClinicalMedicine · 2023-11-15 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Background: Mental health problems are prevalent among youth in low-resource countries and are further compounded by stigma and limited access to traditional treatments. The need for scalable, accessible, and stigma-free mental health interventions is urgent. We developed and tested Pre-Texts, an arts-literacy intervention that targets adolescent depression and anxiety, in Kenya. Methods: We conducted a universal RCT (Randomized Controlled Trial). Students from Kenyan high schools (N = 235, ages 13-19, 53.19% female) were randomized to either Pre-Texts or a study skills control intervention. Pre-Texts involves the use of a text-such an excerpt from a novel, a physics lesson, or a technical manual-to inspire art-making that is followed by collective reflection on the process of interpretation through artmaking. Participants met daily for a week in groups of 6-12 youths for 1-h sessions. Groups were facilitated by high school graduates trained as lay-providers. This study was pre-registered at the Pan African Clinical Trials Registry (PACTR; registration number: PACTR202111497122432). The trial took place between August 11th 2021 and December 18th 2021. Findings: Pre-Texts produced a greater reduction in depression (d = 0.52, 95% CI [0.19, 0.84]) and anxiety (d = 0.51, 95% CI [0.20, 0.81]) symptoms from baseline to 1-month follow-up compared to the control group. Similarly, in a sub-sample of participants with elevated depression and anxiety symptoms, Pre-Texts produced a greater reduction in depression (d = 1.10, 95% CI [0.46, 1.75]) and anxiety (d = 0.54, 95% CI [-0.07, 1.45]) symptoms. Interpretation: Our findings suggest that a brief arts-literacy intervention with challenging school material in a group setting, implemented as an afterschool program, can reduce depression and anxiety symptoms in adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa. Future replication trials with larger sample sizes with extended follow-ups will help assess the strength and sustainability of these effects. Funding: The study was funded by grants from the Mind, Brain, and Behaviour (MBB) Initiative at Harvard University and the Center for African Studies at Harvard University.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Arts-Literacy Intervention for Adolescent Depression and Anxiety Symptoms: Outcomes of a Randomized Controlled Trial of Pre-Texts with Kenyan Adolescents

  2022 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Medicine
  • Psychology
  • Clinical psychology

  Background: Mental health problems among youth in low-resource countries are compounded by the limitations of societal stigma and the inaccessibility of traditional treatments. Therefore, there is a need to develop scalable, accessible, and stigma-free mental health interventions. We developed and tested Pre-Texts, an arts-literacy intervention that targets adolescent depression and anxiety in Kenya. Method: This was a universal RCT where high school students (N=235, ages 13-to-19, 53.19% female) were randomized to either Pre-Texts or a study skills control intervention. Pre-Texts consists of art-making exercises that interpret a literary text, like those required in school. Moments of creative expression are followed by collective reflection on the process of interpretation through art-making. Participants met daily for a week in groups of 6-12 youths (average size = 8) for one-hour sessions. Groups were facilitated by high school graduates (ages 18 - 22) trained as lay-providers. The groups met concurrently as after-school activities. Results: Compared to the control, participants in Pre-Texts reported a greater reduction in depression (d = .53, 95% CI [.22, .84]) and anxiety symptoms from baseline to 1-month follow - up (d = .57, 95% CI [.26, .87]). When we looked at a subset of youths with moderate-to-severe depression and anxiety symptoms, Pre-Texts produced a greater reduction in depression symptoms (d = .76, 95% C [.27, .1.26]) but not in anxiety symptoms (d = -.14, 95% CI [-.64, .35]). Conclusion: This report suggests that an arts-literacy intervention with challenging school material in a group setting, implemented as an afterschool program, can reduce depression and anxiety symptoms in adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa. Replication trials with larger sample sizes and extended follow-ups will help test the strength and sustainability of these effects.

  PublisherDOI

• A Picaresque Parrot and Decent Domesticity

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-08-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Latin America fell in love with itself after the Revolutions of Independence, thanks to self-liberated heroes who courted heroines of various colors and classes and became mutually authorizing citizens. As new countries took shape and constructed institutions, the intense engagement and optimism created, among other foundations, a canon of national romances. Authors of national novels were typically founding fathers who helped to consolidate their new republics during the promising generation for democratic institutions, roughly between the 1850s and 1880s. Legislators, generals, or diplomats by day, they were creative writers by night. The novels projected a path toward harmony and growth through the language of love. Old World tyranny had ended, and people were free to husband the land. Husbands needed equally admirable wives to produce new generations of citizens. But before the passionate military and marital conquests, before romance named the mood and the genre of novel experiments, an ironic Baroque adventure story captured the folly of colonial posturing that passed for elegance; it also indicted the passionate resistance that would soon erupt.

  PublisherDOI

• Latin American Baroque: Or Error by Design

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-08-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The hybrid name for Latin America is a clue to its double consciousness and, as a corollary, to its talent for exploring complexity. A push and pull between competing classical and local lineages among displaced and replaced peoples has brought curses on Latin America, but also the blessings of an unbidden freedom to invent new patterns. If bitterness haunts the deracination on a continental scale, irreverence lightens the burden. From colonial times through the current post-Boom period, Latin American literature has been a vehicle for cagey revenge against metropolitan conventions, and for re-membering aboriginal cultures. The legend of Inkari, for example, literally foretells how the body of the Inca emperor, dismembered by Spanish conquerors, will reassemble underground and emerge triumphant. Double consciousness in Latin America describes a culture of baroque anxiety and compensation for doubt about one’s place in the world. With Afro-Latin American literature, the ironies multiply exponentially. Architectural monuments to excess -- meant to overwhelm worries that followed from the discovery of sophisticated cultures that had no debts Europe – worries about the nature of God, the center of culture, one’s own identity -- are visible throughout the continent’s landscape. Local gods and African orishas adorn Catholic temples. Excess is audible too, in the complex strategies for addressing readers, starting from colonial times and reviving after interruptions of purposeful coherence and optimism. The great first masters of Latin American literature were baroque, practically by default as they navigated conflicting codes and overwhelmed the fault lines with clever structures. As pioneers of local style, they set the tone for future movements, through the taste for complexity waffled when political ambitions for independence or national consolidation triumphed through foundational fictions written by political leaders in order to win the hearts of newly minted citizens. Compared to the skillful jousts with European conventions by baroque masters, nation builders and populists would seem naïve to the ironic novelists who ignited a Boom in Latin American literature and who brought European readers face to face with the structural contradictions of modern cultures.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David M. Ndetei

  University of Nairobi

  8 shared

• Rebeca Simões Brito

  6 shared

• Mercedes Balcells

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  6 shared

• Camila Maciel de Oliveira

  Stanford University

  5 shared

• Pier Luigi Sacco

  University of Chieti-Pescara

  5 shared

• Tom L. Osborn

  Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute

  4 shared

• Claudia M. Witt

  Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

  4 shared

• Victoria Mutiso

  Africa Mental Health Foundation

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Romance Languages and Literatures

  Harvard University

  1980

• M.A., Romance Languages and Literatures

  Harvard University

  1976

• B.A., Spanish and Portuguese

  University of Chicago

  1972