Bio


Roland Greene's 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). Five Words proposes an understanding of early modern culture through the changes embodied in five words or concepts over the sixteenth century: in English, blood, invention, language, resistance, and world, and their counterparts in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Other books include Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago, 1999), which follows the love poetry of the Renaissance into fresh political and colonial contexts in the New World; and Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, 1991), a transhistorical and comparative study of lyric poetics through the fortunes of the lyric sequence from Petrarch to Neruda. Greene is the editor with Elizabeth Fowler of The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge, 1997). His essays address topics such as the colonial baroque, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and Amoretti, Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry, and Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Greene is editor in chief of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which was published in 2012. Prepared in collaboration with the general editor Stephen Cushman and the associate editors Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer, this edition represents a complete revision of the most authoritative reference book on poetry and poetics.

In 2015-16 he served as President of the Modern Language Association.

At Stanford Greene has been 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 has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Danforth Foundation, among others. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Academic Appointments


  • Professor, English
  • Professor, Comparative Literature
  • Professor (By courtesy), Iberian and Latin American Cultures

Administrative Appointments


  • Director, Stanford Humanities Center (2019 - Present)

Honors & Awards


  • Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies
  • Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities
  • Fellowship, Danforth Foundation

Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations


  • President, International Spenser Society (2002 - 2003)
  • President, Modern Language Association of America (2015 - 2016)

Professional Education


  • Ph.D., Princeton University (1985)
  • A.B., Brown University (1979)

2023-24 Courses


All Publications


  • Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA Greene, R. 2016; 131 (3): 594-602
  • Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 1500-1900 Greene, R. 2015; 55 (2): 465-?
  • Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes Greene, R. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013
  • The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics edited by Greene, R. Princeton University Press. 2012
  • Between Experience and Experiment: Five Articles at an Early Modern Crossroads Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts Alduy, C., Greene, R. 2010; 1 (2)
  • Baroque and Neobaroque: Making Thistory PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA Greene, R. 2009; 124 (1): 150-155
  • The "Scriene" and the Channel: England and Spain in Book V of The Faerie Queene JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES Greene, R. 2009; 39 (1): 43-64
  • Colonial becomes postcolonial (El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, chronicler of the Peruvian conquest) MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY Greene, R. 2004; 65 (3): 423-441
  • The post-English English (University language departments, multiculturalism) Conference on the Relation between English and Foreign Languages in the Academy Greene, R. MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOC AMER. 2002: 1241–44
  • Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas Greene, R. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999
  • The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World edited by Fowler, E., Greene, R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1997
  • Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence Greene, R. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1991