Roland Greene
Roland Greene
Mark Pigott OBE Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Focal Groups: Renaissances Workshop in PoeticsContact:
Building 260, Room 215
Phone: 650 725 1214
rgreene@stanford.edu
Office Hours:
On leave spring 2012OVERVIEW:
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 new book, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, will appear from the University of Chicago Press in 2013. He is the editor in chief of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which will be published in 2012.
His past 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).
Greene is the general editor of a series of critical volumes published by the Modern Language Association, entitled World Literatures Reimagined. The first three volumes in the series, Earl Fitz's Brazilian Narrative Traditions in a Comparative Context, Azade Seyhan's Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context, and Kirsty Hooper and Manuel Puga Moruxa's Contemporary Galician Studies, are in print.
The directions of Greene's research are reflected in the three working groups he oversees with colleagues and graduate students, two of which are formal Focal Groups in the Division. In 2004 he established, with Cécile Alduy, Renaissances: A Research Group in Early Modern Literatures, which draws participants from across the Bay Area; in 2006 he created, with Nicholas Jenkins and Harris Feinsod, the Stanford Poetics Workshop, which includes a regular membership of faculty members, advanced graduate students, and fellows at the Humanities Center. A group on Transamerican Studies, co-chaired with Ramón Saldívar, began meeting in the autumn of 2009. 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.
Greene is the Director of Arcade, a digital salon for literature and the humanities.
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.
He has recently served on the Ad Hoc Committee on the Structure of the Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association of America, which made significant changes in the annual meeting, and on the committee for Senior Fellowships of the American Council of Learned Societies.
EDUCATION:
1985: Ph.D., Princeton University
1979: A.B., Brown University
News & Events
May 3, 2012
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Oct 26, 2011
Oct 17, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on:"How I Think (and Write) about What We Feel When We Read (...
Courses
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COMPLIT332Aut2011-12
The emergence of a transatlantic culture in the early modern period. How is the Renaissance of Europe and England fashioned in a conversation with the cultural forms and material realities of the colonial Americas? And how do colonial writings expand and complicate the available understanding of the Renaissance? Readings in Columbus, More, Hakluyt, Spenser, Shakespeare, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.
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DLCL2232011-12
The Renaissances Group brings together faculty members and students from over a dozen departments at Stanford to consider the present and future of early modern studies (provisionally framed as a period spanning the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries) within the humanities. Taking seriously the plural form of the group's name, we seek to explore the early modern period from the widest range of disciplinary, cultural, linguistic, and geographical perspectives possible.
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DLCL2242011-12
The Workshop in Poetics is concerned with the theoretical and practical dimensions of the reading and criticism of poetry. During the three years of its existence, the Workshop has become a central venue at Stanford enabling participants to share their individual projects in a general conversation outside of disciplinary and national confinements. The two dimensions that the workshop sees as urgent are: poetics in its specificity as an arena for theory and interpretive practice, and historical poetics as a particular set of challenges for the reader and scholar.
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COMPLIT142Win2011-12
The course offers a wide-ranging overview of the literatures of the Americas in comparative perspective, emphasizing continuities and crises that are common to North American, Central American, and South American literatures as well as the distinctive national and cultural elements of a diverse array of primary works. Topics include the definitions of such concepts as empire and colonialism; the encounters between world-views of European and indigenous peoples; the emergence of creole and racially mixed populations; slavery; the New World voice; myths of America as paradise or utopia; the coming of modernism; twentieth-century avant-gardes such as the Brazilian Antropofagia or Cannibalist movement; and distinctive modern episodes—the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, magic realism, Noigandres—in unaccustomed conversation with each other.
While the course is formally organized by lectures, it is unusually dialogic. Professors Greene and Saldívar often question or challenge each other's interpretations, and the Friday meetings are devoted to an open discussion in response to issues raised by students during the week. Close to the research interests of both professors, the course demonstrates how new contexts—in this case, the hemispheric—change our understanding of literary works and how interpretation emerges out of conversation and debate.
GER:DB-Hum EC-AmerCul
