On Tuesday 24 March, CLIC is hosting a seminar with Prof. Roland Greene, titled "Class of Excellence". 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 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
Click here for more information and to register. Those interested may also wish to register separately for the following events:
- The Inaugural Lecture (4 March 2026, Ghent): Literary Studies After Universalism: A History and a Manifesto
- The Closing Symposium (7 May 2026, Brussels): Poetics in an Age of Differences
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).
