Outside

At moments like these, tending to her garden and planning the homey projects that bring her such joy, Sorensen seems the quintessential earth mother. But there is a whole lot more to this genial woman than meets the eye. Over the last 40 years, she has invented and reinvented herself—morphing from a counterculture folk singer to midwestern farm wife, back-to-basics foodie and, most recently, into a prominent cultural historian. 

These days, Sorensen, 68, is Monticello’s African American Research Historian, an indispensable member of a team working on two extremely high-profile projects. The first is the restoration of Mulberry Row, where Jefferson’s enslaved artisans and house servants lived and worked—a multi-year project involving dozens of people. The second is a first-ever Monticello exhibit at the Smithsonian, scheduled for 2012.

Sorensen, who holds a master’s and Ph.D. from the College of William and Mary, certainly has put in her academic and research time, but her real domain over the last three decades has been the historic house museum, where many visitors have surely encountered her. For years, Sorensen was the woman in a mob cap at Colonial Williamsburg, deftly spinning carded wool into thread while explaining native sources of dye and the science of 15th-century African indigo. She’s whipped up soap at the Museum of Frontier Culture, cheese in the Gunston Hall kitchen and nutritious stews in an iron pot over an open fire on Mulberry Row, regaling onlookers with stories of famed chefs from Mary Randolph to Edna Lewis. Though she’s capable of holding any audience rapt from the podium or with her elegant prose, the most vivid encounters with Sorensen always seem to occur outside: It’s this gift that makes her first and foremost a public historian.