About

Roland Greene is the Mark Pigott KBE Professor, Anthony P. Meier Family Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University. His research and teaching focus on the early modern literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world, as well as poetry and poetics from the Renaissance to the present. Greene's work explores cultural and literary transformations through historical and comparative perspectives, with notable contributions including his book 'Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes,' which analyzes the evolution of five key words over the sixteenth century across multiple languages. He has also authored 'Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas' and 'Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence,' and is the editor of significant scholarly volumes such as 'The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World' and the fourth edition of the 'Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.' Greene served as President of the Modern Language Association in 2015-16 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Stanford, he co-chairs research workshops in early modern studies and poetics, fostering scholarly collaboration among students and faculty. His academic career includes positions at Harvard and Oregon, where he was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Art
• History
• Literature
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Chapter 9. Close Reading Transformed: The New Criticism and the World

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • History
  • Literature
  PublisherDOI

• Letters, Poems, and Prose Fictions in Cosmopolitan Latinity

  Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Literatures · 2019-06-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  /

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Presidential Address 2016: Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future

  PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America · 2016-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Some Things Don't Change Much. One Hundred and Fourteen years ago, at an MLA conference in Champaign, Illinois, the president of the Central Division, the Germanist James Taft Hatfield of Northwestern University, delivered an address on “the relation of scholarship to the commonwealth,” which I recognize as a version of this year's theme, Literature and Its Publics. When the address was published later in PMLA, the account of it went as follows: “the remarks of the President were clear, incisive, sparkling, and proved an excellent introduction to one of the most interesting meetings” of the association. (The minutes go on to share the secretary's concern that the conference has too many papers, which run too long, and to record the balance in the Central Division's funds: $1.33 [“Proceedings” lxxv].)

  PublisherDOI

• Spenser's Unwritten Poetics

  ˜The œSpenser review · 2016-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• The 2016 Maclean Lecture

  ˜The œSpenser review · 2016-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Who Was Shakespeare's Cervantes? [Reception]

  Florida International University Digital Commons (Florida International University) · 2016-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama

  Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 · 2015-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of Tudor and Stuart Drama and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of works received by SEL for consideration follow.

  PublisherDOI

• Interamerican Obversals: Haroldo de Campos and Allen Ginsberg Circa 1960

  Humanities Commons CORE (Modern Language Association / Columbia University) · 2014-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay compares two mid-twentieth century poets of the Americas, Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo de Campos, in view of how their work circa 1960 intersects despite the differences in their poetics. It introduces the notion of the obversal, or the identity among poems through a common history.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Blood

  2013-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter explores two works from the late sixteenth century, namely: the anonymous domestic tragedy, A Warning for Fair Women, and Miguel de Cervantes's novella La fuerza de la sangre (The power of blood). During this period, these two works, and many others, create too many competing allegories in different degrees of revision for the word blood. This trend in literature during the period shows that there is a semantic shift under way. The chapter tracks this change in semantics and notes its relation to materialism. The change in the representations of blood from notions of nobility, divinity, and the cosmos towards more modern perceptions such as family, class, and race is noted by the author. The chapter is concerned with blood's semantic history, and asks: How does the concept of blood get reinvented in the late sixteenth century to take fresh account of the material, the liquid itself?

  PublisherDOI

• World

  2013-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Margaret Ferguson

  19 shared

• Zachary Sng

  British Library

  16 shared

• Lauren Shohet

  British Library

  16 shared

• J. Guillory

  16 shared

• H. Duncan

  University of Pennsylvania

  16 shared

• Jonathan M. Goldberg

  Princeton University

  16 shared

• Christo- Pher Gaggero

  University of California, Davis

  16 shared

• Sharon Marcus

  16 shared

Awards & honors

• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• President of the Modern Language Association (2015-16)