Avenali Lectures

Stephen Greenblatt, Avenali Chair in the Humanities 2005-2006

“Shakespeare and the Ethics of Authority” || March 21, 2006
with a follow-up panel discussion on March 22, 2007

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. His areas of specialization include Shakespeare, 16th- and 17th-century English literature, the literature of travel and exploration, and literary theory.

Greenblatt’s publications include the following books: Will in the World:  How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Modern Culture; Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England; Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare; Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles; and Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley. In addition, he is the General Editor of The Norton Shakespeare and the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature.  He is also (with Charles Mee) the author of a play, Cardenio.

He serves on the editorial or advisory boards of numerous journals and is an editor and co-founder of Representations. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim, Fulbright, Howard and Kyoto University Foundations, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has received the James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA, the British Council Prize in the Humanities, and the Mellon Distinguished Humanist Award. He is an Honorary Corresponding Fellow of The English Association, U.K. For Will in the World, he received the 2004 Will Award from The Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, D.C., and the 2005 Independent Publisher Book Award for Biography; the book was also a finalist for the following awards: the National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the National Book Critic Circle Awards, the Quills, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize of the Boston Author’s Club. He has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a permanent fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, and has served as president of the Modern Language Association of America.  

Greenblatt also taught at UC Berkeley. He has lectured widely and has held numerous visiting professorships. His named lecture series include the Lionel Trilling Seminar at Columbia; the Theo Crosby Memorial Lecture at the Globe Theatre, London; the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University; the Carpenter Lecturers at the University of Chicago; and the University Lectures at Princeton University. He received his B.A. (summa cum laude) from Yale University, a second B.A. from Cambridge University, and his Ph.D. from Yale.  He was born in Boston and has three sons.

Follow-up Panel Discussants: Greenblatt, Wendy Brown (departments of Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies), Roland Greene, (departments of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University), and Jeffrey Knapp (Department of English).