Rate My Professor Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Harvard University. He earned his B.A. from Yale University in 1964, M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge in 1966, and Ph.D. from Yale University in 1969. Greenblatt taught for 28 years at the University of California, Berkeley, as the Class of 1932 Professor, joined Harvard in 1997 as the Harry Levin Professor of Literature, and was appointed John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities in 2000. He has held visiting professorships at universities including Oxford, the University of London, Kyoto University, the University of Bologna, and Peking University.

Greenblatt's research specializations encompass Shakespeare, early modern literature and culture, literature of travel and exploration, religion and literature, literature and anthropology, and literary and cultural theory. He is the founder of the new historicism school of literary criticism. Key publications include Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), Marvelous Possessions (1991), Hamlet in Purgatory (2001), Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004), The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011), The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (2017), Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018), Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud (2024), and Dark Renaissance (2025). He serves as general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (1997) and The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2000), has edited seven collections of criticism, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. His honors include the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and 2011 National Book Award for The Swerve, the 2016 Holberg Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize (awarded twice), the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, and the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre. Greenblatt was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Philosophical Society, Accademia degli Arcadi, and a fellow of the British Academy.