Stephen Greenblatt: Utopian Pleasure

"Utopian Pleasure" is about the ambiguous place of Epicurean pleasure-seeking in Lorenzo Valla and Thomas More. Greenblatt explores in particular More's interest in testing whether the Epicurean vision could actually serve as the basis not for an elite group who had withdrawn from the world into a charmed garden but for an entire society.

Prof. Stephan J. Greenblatt

since 2000 John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at the Department of English, Harvard University; 1969 Ph.D. at Yale University; 1964-1996 The Class of 1932 Professor at the Department of English, University of California, Berkeley; 1997-2000 The Harry Levin Professor of Literature at the Department of English, Harvard University

Visiting Professorships:

Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; Queen Mary and Westfield College; University of London; Kyoto University; University of Torino; University of Florence; University of Trieste; Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; University of Chicago; University of Bologna; Peking University, Peking People's Republic of China; University of California, Santa Cruz

Honors / Awards / named Lectures (selected):

Campbell Lectures, Rice University, Houston (2008); Leslie Stephens Lecture, Trinity Hall, Cambridge (2007); Adorno-Vorlesungen, Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt (2006); The William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, DC (2005); Finalist, Pulitzer Prize, Biography (2004); Finalist, National Book Award, Nonfiction (2004); Finalist, National Book Critic Circle Award, Biography/Autobiography (2004); Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Biography (2004); Honorary Corresponding Fellow The English Association, United Kingdom; Lionel Trilling Seminar, Columbia University, speaker (2003); Erasmus Institute Prize (2002); Doctor of Literature, honorary degree, Queen Mary College, University of London (2002); James Thin Lecture, University of Edinburgh (2000); Plenary Address, English Literary Society of Japan (1998); University Lectures, Princeton University; Plenary Address, Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting (1998); James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association, 1989 (for Shakespearean Negotiations)

Publications (selected):

Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, with Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pal Nyiri, and Friederike Pannewick, Cambridge 2010; Freiheit, Schönheit und die Grenzen des Hasses Suhrkamp, translated by Robin Cackett and Klaus Binder. Frankfurt a.M. 2007; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, New York / London 2004; The Greenblatt Reader, with Michael Payne, London etc. 2005; Hamlet in Purgatory, Princeton 2001; Was ist Literaturgeschichte? trans. Reinhard Kaiser and Barbara Naumann, Frankfurt a.M. 2000; Practicing New Historicism, with Catherine Gallagher, Chicago 2000; New Historicism: Literaturgeschichte als Poetik der Kultur, ed. Moritz Bassler, Frankfurt 1995; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Oxford 1991; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, New York / London 1990; Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley 1988; Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare, Chicago 1980; Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973; Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley, New Haven 1965.