Sorensen’s book project examines how the daily communal activity of playing and singing music was central to history keeping, political debates, and discussing the transition from indigenous belief systems under the Aztec Empire to Catholicism during the early colonial period. The singers and musicians that performed these songs used stories of their ancient past and the Aztec Empire, and especially the challenges their people faced, to better articulate and understand their present under Spanish colonialism. Sorensen’s work connects Nahua ideas of performance, linguistic expressions, and memory to show how the songs were a public form of negotiation meant to express dissatisfaction with political realities (both precolonial and colonial) while celebrating their own ethnic pride and imperial past. Sorensen’s project relies on a highly contentious corpus of Nahuatl song lyrics commonly referred to as the Cantares Mexicanos.

In addition to his work on transforming his dissertation into a monograph, Sorensen is completing a primary source translation and transcription with accompanying analysis of three songs about the Conquest of Mexico from the Cantares Mexicanos that will soon be under contract."