The article presents the academic trajectory of Vera Zolberg (1932-2016), one of the founders of the field of sociology of art in the United States. Based on an account of the sociologist made during her last visit to Brazil, the text reveals the adversities that she faced in order to obtain an academic training by being a woman, a jew, a wife and a mother. From childhood in the South Bronx, to her studies in Hunter College, to the life in Boston and in Texas to University of Chicago, Vera Zolberg’s testimony evidences the movement of her subjectivity between opportunities and adversities, contingencies and surprises, travels and journeys in search of her intellectual autonomy, just as it reveals to us the peculiarities of American life, which rarely, appears in discourses about the postwar scene.
Vera Zolberg; Academic formation; Intellectual autonomy; Sociology of art