Federico Sor is an historian of modern Latin America who teaches “Global and International History.” At the International Relations Program, he has also taught “Populism in Comparative Perspective” and the history of “US Interventions.” Additional courses he has taught in the past include “A History of Capitalism,” “Latin American History in Global Perspective,” “Revolution and Counterrevolution in Latin America,” and “Contemporary World: Global History since 1800.”
Professor Sor’s historical research focus has been the Cold War in the Southern Cone. The book based on his dissertation, The Pedagogy of Revolution and Counterrevolution in Argentina, 1966-1983, is currently under review by the University of California Press. The book aims at a better understanding of the most violent dictatorship in Argentine history through a close analysis of the foundational projects for a new republic as they were expressed in educational programs in reaction to previous revolutionary projects. More broadly, the book is an attempt to understand the ways education programs have been used to disseminate and legitimize competing ideologies and political projects, in particular those of the political Right.
Professor Sor is concurrently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Populism and Metaphysics. The book engages with the main perspectives on populism in a very vast literature, examining their logical contradictions and testing them against historical and sociological accounts of popular movements. The book questions the usefulness of populism as a category of analysis, since all modern political phenomena are populist to varying degrees, and proposes a return to the classification of politics along a right-left spectrum.
A critical analysis of some approaches to “populism,” as well as an analysis of metaphysical and transcendental forms of history writing, can be found in the recent article:
Federico Sor, “Metaphysics in History: Notes on the Origins of Authoritarianism and Populism,” History and Theory 62, no. 2 (June 2023): 225-250
Prior to joining the Program in International Relations, Prof. Sor taught Latin American history and global history within the College of Arts and Sciences at NYU, at the NYU School of Professional Studies, and at East China Normal University. He was also Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Global Perspectives on Society at NYU Shanghai.
In addition to his Ph.D. in History, Prof. Sor holds an M.A. in Political Theory from the New School for Social Research, with a heavy emphasis on philosophy. He holds a double B.A. degree, in History and French Language and Literature, from the University of Maryland, as well as a certificate in Classical Studies. He has received fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Conference on Latin American History, among other sources.