Roland Greene

Roland Greene

Mark Pigott KBE Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences

Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Focal Groups:
    Renaissances
    Workshop in Poetics

Contact:

Building 260, Room 215
Phone: 650 725 1214
rgreene@stanford.edu

Office Hours:

Tuesday 12 noon to 2 p.m. in 460-302, and by appointment

BIO:

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 early in 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).
 
Greene is the general editor of a series of critical volumes titled 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 Renaissances: A Research Group in Early Modern Literatures, which presents younger scholars from around the U.S. and elsewhere working on topics of long-term significance (for 2012-14, the topic is "Nodes, Networks, Names"); 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. A group on Transamerican Studies, co-chaired with Ramón Saldívar, began meeting in the autumn of 2009 and is currently on hiatus. 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.
 
Greene is currently Second Vice President of the Modern Language Association of America; he will serve as President in 2015.

EDUCATION:

1985: Ph.D., Princeton University

1979: A.B., Brown University

EVENTS:

Future Lectures and Conference Papers:

"Auerbach's Universals," Reading Mimesis Chapter 13, Shakespeare Association of America, St. Louis, April 2014

Selected Recent Lectures:

"Piracy and Proximity in the Early Modern World," Keynote Lecture, Close Encounters: Proximity and Presence, Berkeley-Stanford English Conference, April 2013

"Early Modern Networks and the Imperative of Criticism," Department of English, Lehigh University, March 2013

"Resistance from Cartone to Act," Keynote Lecture, Resistance and Occupation: Seventh Annual Graduate Conference, Department of Romance Languages, University of Oregon, November 2012

"The Habsburg and Tudor Poetic Machines," Rivalry and Rhetoric in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Black Legends and Domestic Dissent, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, February 2012

"What Was Genre Criticism?," Department of English, University of Waterloo, June 2012; Plenary Lecture, Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society, Gonzaga University, October 2011

"Comparison Without Universals," Keynote Lecture, Comparatively Speaking: The Comparative Cultures and Literature Forum, Cornell University, March 2010

"Figures of Power and Resistance in Early Modern Prose Fiction," Leonora Woodman Lecture, Department of English, Purdue University, October 2008

"The Rise of 'Experience' in Early Modern Culture," Keynote Lecture, Northern California Renaissance Conference, University of California, Berkeley, September 2008

"The Worlding of Early Modern Culture: Buchanan, Cervantes, Milton," Paul Gottschalk Lecture, Department of English, Cornell University, April 2008

ADVISEES:

Ph.D. students:

Rhiannon Lewis, ""One Word My Whole Years Work": Time, Use, and Labor in Renaissance Poetry," Department of English, in progress

Ryan Haas, "The Draggled Muse: Early Modern Literature and the Poetics of Triviality," Department of English, in progress

Lucy Alford, "Unfolding Presence: Poetic Attention through the Lens of the Twentieth Century," Department of Comparative Literature, in progress

Talya Meyers, "'Streight Course' and 'Wandring Eye': Reconsidering the Epic," Department of English, in progress

Noam Pines, "The Poetics of Dehumanization in Jewish Literature," Department of Comparative Literature, in progress

Virginia Ramos, "The Modern Lyrical Novel," Department of Comparative Literature, in progress

Bronwen Tate, "Putting it All In, Leaving it All Out: Expansion and Compression in Post-War Poetry," Department of Comparative Literature, in progress

Colin Moore, "Communicative Situations in Early Modern European Fiction," Department of Comparative Literature, in progress

Christopher Donaldson, "The Local Poet in the Romantic Tradition," Department of Comparative Literature, 2012. Now Literary Research Associate, Spatial Humanities Project, Lancaster University.

Kathryn Hume, "The Performance of Analysis in Seventeenth-Century Literature and Science," Department of Comparative Literature, 2012. Now Marketing Content Specialist, IntApp.

Anton Vander Zee, "'The Final Lilt of Songs': Late Whitman and the Long American Century," Department of English, 2012. Now Visiting Assistant Professor of English, College of Charleston.

Frederick L. Blumberg, "Literature and Its Rivals, 1500-1660," Department of Comparative Literature, 2011. Now Assistant Professor of English, University of Hong Kong.

Fabian Goppelsröder, "Kalendergeschichte and fait divers: The Poetics of Circumscribed Space," Department of Comparative Literature, 2011. Now Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Potsdam.

Harris Feinsod, "Fluent Mundo: Inter-American Poetry, 1939-1973," Department of Comparative Literature, 2011. Now Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern University.

Stephanie Schmidt, "Foundational Narratives, Performance and the City," Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, 2011. Now Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, University of Tulsa.

David Marno, "Thanking as Thinking: The Poetics of Grace in John Donne's Holy Sonnets," Department of Comparative Literature, 2011. Now Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley.

Anne Marie Guglielmo, "Contested Genealogies in Early Modern Mediterranean Literature," Department of Comparative Literature, 2010

Ema Vyroubalová, "Linguistic Alterity and Foreignness in Early Modern England, 1534-1625," Department of English, 2010. Recipient of the department's Alden Prize for best dissertation, 2011. Now Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature, Trinity College, Dublin.

Claire Bowen, “Between Pole and Tropic: Poetry and Fiction, 1945-1955," Department of English, 2010. Now Assistant Professor of English, Dickinson College.

Enrique Lima, "Forms of Conquest: Indian Conflict and the Novel in the Americas," Department of Comparative Literature, 2006. Now Assistant Professor of English, University of Oregon.

David Colón, "Embodying the Ideogram: Orientalism and the Visual Aesthetic in Modernist Poetry," Department of English, 2004. Now Assistant Professor of English, Texas Christian University.

Jillanne Michell, "The Ethics of Toleration in English Renaissance Literature," Department of English, University of Oregon, 2004. Now Professor of English and Department Chair, Umpqua Community College.

Carolyn Bergquist, "Worlds of Persuasion," Department of English, University of Oregon, 2003. Now Director of Composition, University of Oregon.

Kate Jenckes, "Allegories of Writing / History: Borges, Benjamin, and Buenos Aires," Program in Comparative Literature, University of Oregon, 2001. Now Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Michigan.

Miles Taylor, "Nation, History, and Theater: Representing the Past in the Drama of Early Modern England," Department of English, University of Oregon, 2000. Now Associate Professor of English, Le Moyne College.

Nina Chordas, "Utopian Poetics: The Praxis and Discourse of Utopia in England and America, 1516-1637," Department of English, University of Oregon, 1998. Now Associate Professor of English and Department Chair, University of Alaska Southeast.

Jaspal Singh, "Maddening Inscriptions: 'Madness' as Resistance in Postcolonial African and South Asian Women's Fiction and Film," Program in Comparative Literature, University of Oregon, 1998. Now Professor of English, Northern Michigan University.

Karen Piper, "Territories of the Novel: Borders, Identities, and Displacements in Twentieth-Century Fiction," Program in Comparative Literature, University of Oregon, 1996. Now Professor of English, University of Missouri, Columbia.

Marilyn G. Miller, "Miscegenation and the Narrative Voice," Program in Comparative Literature, University of Oregon, 1995. Now Associate Professor of Spanish, Tulane University.

News & Events

May 3, 2012
The DLCL is pleased to announce that Russell Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities,...
Oct 26, 2011
Oct 17, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on:"How I Think (and Write) about What We Feel When We Read (...

Courses

  • COMPLIT
    142
    Win
    2012-13

    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 a major part of each meeting is 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.

    The course welcomes students of all majors and interests.

    GER:DB-Hum EC-AmerCul
  • DLCL
    224
    Aut
    Win
    Spr
    2012-13

    The Workshop in Poetics is concerned with the theoretical and practical dimensions of the reading and criticism of poetry. During the seven years of its existence, the Workshop has become a central venue at Stanford for sharing projects in a general conversation outside of disciplinary and national limits. Its core members are about twenty graduate students and several members of the Stanford faculty. Everyone is welcome.

    The workshop's main purpose is to offer Ph.D. students a place to present their work in progress in a community of peers and faculty. Not bound by language or period, the group has discussed most of the literatures studied at Stanford.

  • DLCL
    223
    Win
    Spr
    2012-13

    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.

Publications