Nothing comes from nothing: Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare and New Historicism

Holberg Prize Laureate, and Pulitzer Prize winner Prof. Stephen Greenblatt (John Cogan University Professor, Harvard University) sits down with Prof. 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. Prof. Greenblatt talks 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.

Join us as we catch a glimpse behind-the-scenes of how literary scholarship on the Bard, William Shakespeare, in the heyday of the counter-cultural 1960s and 70s revolutionized literary studies.


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