On 1st and 2nd February, 2016 Holberg Laureate Stephen Greenblatt will be featured at the Jaipur Literature Festival.
As part of a collaboration between the Holberg Prize and Jaipur Literature Festival, Holberg Laureate Stephen Greenblatt will be featured at two events at the 2025 JLF.
The first event is called “The Swerve Revisited: How the World Became Modern”.
In his Pulitzer-prize winning book The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt argued that the Renaissance recovery of a single ancient manuscript, Lucretius’ De rerum natura, altered the world. How do settled modes of interpretation, styles of thought, subjects of attention – change direction? What provokes them and how do dominant institutions respond? This conversation will explore the ways in which seismic shifts in human understanding come about.
The event will feature Stephen Greenblatt in conversation with Scottish historian and art historian William Dalrymple, who is co-founder and co-director of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.
The speakers will be introduced by Chair of the Holberg Board Professor Jørgen Sejersted.
Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt (photo: Marit Hommedal, NTB Scanpix / The Holberg Prize).
Stephen Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author, and the 2016 Holberg Laureate. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He is one of the founders of new historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as “cultural poetics”. His works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt’s many books include Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004), and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011).