On 3rd January, 2025, 2016 Holberg Laureate Stephen Greenblatt was interviewed in Delhi, as a part of the Holberg Prize promotional tour to India.
On 3rd February, 2025, 2016 Holberg Prize Laureate, and Pulitzer Prize winner Professor Stephen Greenblatt sat down with Professor Sambudha Sen (Department of English, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University) to talk about his long and storied career, from a young graduate student at Yale and Cambridge, to University of California, Berkeley, and now at Harvard University.
Professor Greenblatt talked about the education he received, and the experiences that came to influence him—from studying with the renowned literary critic Raymond Williams at Cambridge to attending seminars held by Michel Foucault on Emile Zola at Berkeley—as he, along with his colleagues, broke away from New Criticism, to articulate a new, materialist, literary criticism— New Historicism.
The interview is conducted by Sambudha Sen, Senior Professor at Shiv Nadar University. The production is a collaboration between the Holberg Prize and Shiv Nadar University.
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).
