Stephen Greenblatt

'Tell My Story': The Human Compulsion to Narrate

To watch the video of the 2014 IHR Annual Distinguished Lecturer, Stephen Greenblatt

This video is password protected and limited to the larger ASU community. Please contact the IHR at ihr@asu.edu or 480.965.3000 to obtain the password.

Pulitzer Prize Award winner and Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University Stephen Greenblatt was featured as the 2014 IHR Annual Distinguished Lecturer in March of 2014. Dr. Greenblatt is a renowned literary critic and scholar with expertise in Renaissance and Shakespeare studies.

One of the founders of “new historicism,” Greenblatt contributes prominent scholarship that emphasizes a literary work’s original history and context while seeking for connections to the present. He has published twelve books and is the editor of seven collections of criticism. Some of his accolades include the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Award for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, two Guggenheim Fellowships, MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, and Harvard University’s Cabot Fellowship, among many others. In addition to his critical acclaim, Greenblatt’s 2004 book on the life of William Shakespeare, Will in the World, remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for nine weeks. He has been a visiting professor across the world in Paris, Bologna, London, Beijing, Kyoto, Torino, Trieste and Florence.

This event was sponsored by the Institute for Humanities Research, a research unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and supported by the ASU Foundation's Presidential Engagement Programs (PEP).

Photo courtesy of Rose Lincoln/Harvard University.