Roland Greene

Professor of English and Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
Mark Pigott KBE Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences
Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities
Director of the Stanford Humanities Center
Department
Ph.D., Princeton University (1985)
A.B., Brown University (1979)

Roland Greene is a scholar of Renaissance culture, especially the literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world, and of poetry and poetics from the sixteenth century to the present. His most recent book is Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago, 2013). He is the editor in chief of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012).

 

His other books include Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago, 1999), which argues that the love poetry of the Renaissance had a formative role in European ideas about the Americas during the first phase of the colonial period; Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, 1991), a transhistorical study of lyric poetics; and, edited with Elizabeth Fowler, The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge, 1997).

 

The directions of Greene's research are reflected in the two working groups he oversees with colleagues and graduate students, both formally recognized as Focal Groups in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. In 2004 he established Renaissances: A Research Group in Early Modern Literatures, which presents younger scholars from around the U.S. and elsewhere in conversation with Stanford Ph.D. students about work in progress. In 2006 he created the Stanford Poetics Workshop, which includes a regular membership of faculty members, advanced graduate students, and fellows at the Humanities Center. These groups invite both Stanford scholars and visitors to present research in progress, and serve to assemble the community of Ph.D. students currently working in these areas.

 

At Stanford he is actively involved with the Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities, which brings postdoctoral scholars to campus, with the Bing Overseas Studies Program, and with the Program in Structured Liberal Education (SLE), of which he is a former director.

 

In 2015-16 Greene served as President of the Modern Language Association of America. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Contact

Office
Pigott Hall, Bldg 260, Rm 215
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Fields of Interest

Renaissance culture, especially the literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world, and of poetry and poetics from the sixteenth century to the present