Information

Membership Number: FCA3406

Membership Type: Fellowship

Division: Humanities

Corresponding Email: ****nbl@fas.harvard.edu

Homepage(s): https://sites.harvard.edu/stephen-greenblatt/ 

Present and Previous Positions

Harvard University
John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, 2000–present
Harry Levin Professor of Literature, 1997–2000

University of California, Berkeley
Professor, Department of English, 1964–1996

Selected Visiting Professorships
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London
Kyoto University
University of Torino
University of Florence
University of Trieste
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
University of Chicago
University of Bologna
Peking University
University of California, Santa Cruz

Fields of Scholarship and Research Interests

Renaissance literature; Shakespeare studies; early modern English literature and culture; literary criticism and theory; intellectual and cultural history; history of ideas

Professor Stephen Greenblatt is one of the most influential literary scholars of the contemporary era and a central figure in the study of Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and early modern culture. His work has been especially important in reshaping how literature is read in relation to power, religion, politics, institutions, and the symbolic forms through which societies imagine themselves. Across several decades, he has helped transform the practice of literary study by insisting that texts are never isolated objects, but are embedded in larger historical worlds. 

He is widely associated with the development of new historicism, a mode of criticism that brought literary interpretation into sustained dialogue with cultural history, social energy, and the circulation of ideas across institutions and forms of life. His scholarship ranges across Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, selfhood and representation, travel and encounter, religion and the afterlife, classical reception, and the fate of humanistic inquiry itself. In both specialized scholarship and works written for a broader public, he has shown an unusual capacity to join archival learning, conceptual range, and literary imagination. 

His books have had a particularly wide impact not only within literary studies, but also across history, cultural theory, intellectual history, and the humanities more broadly. Works such as Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Shakespearean Negotiations, Hamlet in Purgatory, Will in the World, and The Swerve have each, in different ways, altered the terms of discussion in their fields. His scholarship is marked by historical sensitivity, interpretive boldness, and a rare ability to speak at once to specialists and to a wider educated readership.

Honors, Awards and Other Membership

Holberg Prize Laureate, 2016.

Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, 2012.

National Book Award for Nonfiction, 2011.

International Fellow of the British Academy, elected 2019.

Honorary Doctorate, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2024.

William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, 2005.

James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association, 1989.

Mellon Distinguished Humanist Award, 2002.

Wilbur Cross Medal, Yale University, 2010.

Guggenheim Fellow.

Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Fellow of the American Philosophical Society.

Permanent Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and the Arts (Germany).

Accademia dell’Arcadia.

Selected Publications

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Greenblatt, Stephen, with Catherine Gallagher. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespeare’s Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

Greenblatt, Stephen. The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. New York: W. W. Norton, 2017.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe. New York: W. W. Norton, 2025.

Other Information

Greenblatt CV.pdf

Beyond his books and essays, Professor Greenblatt has played a major editorial and institutional role in the modern humanities. He has served as General Editor of The Norton Shakespeare and General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, two of the most widely used editorial enterprises in the Anglophone study of literature. 

He is also a founding coeditor of the journal Representations, a publication that has been especially influential in linking literary study with broader work in history, culture, and theory. What distinguishes Greenblatt’s career is not only the originality of his interpretations, but also the scale on which he has shaped the intellectual habits of literary study. Few scholars in the humanities have done more to bring Renaissance literature into sustained conversation with cultural history, political imagination, and the wider life of ideas. His work has helped generations of readers see literature not as something sealed off from the world, but as one of the places where a civilization reveals its fears, ambitions, improvisations, and forms of self-understanding.