Speaker

Prof. Roland Greene is the Mark Pigott KBE Professor Anthony P. Meier Family Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University, a Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Director and Stanford Humanities Center. During 2026, he will be a Francqui International Chair at Ghent University.

His research and teaching are concerned with the early modern literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world, and with poetry and poetics from the Renaissance to the present. His most recent book is Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago, 2013). His other books include Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago, 1999); and Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, 1991). Greene is the editor with Elizabeth Fowler of The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge, 1997), and he is editor in chief of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012).

In 2015-16 he served as President of the Modern Language Association. His theme for the 2016 Annual Convention in Austin, Texas was Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future. At Stanford Greene is co-chair and founder of two research workshops in which most of his Ph.D. students participate. Renaissances brings together early modernists from the Bay Area to discuss work in progress, while the Poetics Workshop provides a venue for innovative scholarship in the broad field of international and historical poetics. Greene has taught at Harvard and Oregon, where for six years he was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.