Roland Greene
Roland Greene (born 1957) is a scholar of the early modern literature and culture of England, Latin Europe, and the colonial Americas; and of poetry and poetics from the sixteenth century to the present. He is the Mark Pigott KBE Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University.
He is the author of Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (2013), a study of the long sixteenth century in Europe and the Americas through the changes embodied in five common words across several languages; Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (1999), which explores the social and political implications of love poetry in the first decades after the Columbian and Brazilian enterprises in the New World; and Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (1991), a study of fundamental issues in lyric poetics from Francis Petrarch's fourteenth-century Canzoniere to the late twentieth-century poetry of the Chilean Pablo Neruda and the Peruvian Martín Adán. He is the editor in chief of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edition (2012), the leading reference book in its field. He is the author of many articles on early modern literature, especially poetry.
Greene is President of the Modern Language Association in 2015.
A graduate of Fairfax High School (Los Angeles), Greene studied at Brown University and Princeton University, and began his professorial career at Harvard University, where he was an Assistant and Associate Professor from 1984 to 1992. He served for six years as the Director of the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon, where he was Professor of Comparative Literature and English. He joined Stanford in 2001, and in 2002 was appointed Head of the reconstituted Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. He continued in that role until 2010.
Greene is the Director of Arcade, a digital salon concerned with literature and humanities.