Nothing Comes From Nothing: Holberg Laureate Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare and New Historicism

On 3rd February, 2025, 2016 Holberg Prize Laureate, and Pulitzer Prize winner Professor Stephen Greenblatt (John Cogan University Professor, Harvard University) sat 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. 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. More events: holbergprize.org