Register for the VUB "Class of Excellence" with Prof. Roland Greene
The VUB "Class of Excellence" forms part of a four-university seminar series exploring universalism—its rise, its fall, and what might come after in literary studies. Building on ideas introduced in Prof. Greene’s inaugural lecture, this seminar invites a focused discussion on who writes literary criticism today, who reads it, and why.
Class of Excellence (VUB)
Universalism or What? Who Writes? Who Reads?
Date & time: Tuesday 24 March, 10:00–12:00
Location: Room Van Gogh, Pleinlaan 5, 5th floor (VUB Main Campus, Etterbeek)
Open to: PhD students, postdocs, and lecturers
Participants may also wish to register separately for:
- The Inaugural Lecture (4 March 2026, Ghent): Literary Studies After Universalism: A History and a Manifesto
- Register here
- The Closing Symposium (7 May 2026, Brussels): Poetics in an Age of Differences
- Register here
Professor Roland Greene (A.B., Brown University, 1979; Ph.D., Princeton University, 1985) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he holds the Mark Pigott KBE Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences and the Anthony P. Meier Family Professorship in the Humanities. He currently serves as Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. Greene’s scholarship explores poetry and poetics from 1500 to the present with a focus on Renaissance and early modern literature across the English, Iberian, and Latin American worlds. His major works include Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton University Press, 1991), Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (University of Chicago Press, 1999), and Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (University of Chicago Press, 2013). He also co-edited The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge University Press, 1997) with Elizabeth Fowler and served as Editor-in-Chief of the fourth edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton University Press, 2012), a comprehensive revision of the discipline’s most authoritative reference work. He is former President of the Modern Language Association (2015–2016), where he advocated for inclusivity and the public value of the humanities. From 2010 to 2023, he directed Arcade: The Humanities in the World, an open-access digital platform for global humanities scholarship, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Questions? Please contact gry.ulstein@vub.be
This event is hosted by the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings.