Critic Bios

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was born in Poitiers, France. He studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and received his degree in Philosophy in 1948, in Psychology in 1950, and was awarded a diploma in Psychopathology in 1952. From 1954 to 1958 he taught French at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. He returned to France in 1960 to head the Philosophy Department at the University of Clermont-Ferrard and also published his first book that year, titled Madness and Civilization. His next book, The Order of Things, appeared in 1966 and received wide attention. Foucault was elected to the College de France in 1970 and named Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. The last decade of his life was devoted to The History of Sexuality, an unfinished project which appeared in three volumes before his death in 1984 from AIDS-related complications.

Stephen Greenblatt was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and received a PhD in English from Yale in 1969 (he also studied literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge University). In 1969, Greenblatt joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught for nearly three decades. He has been Professor of Literature at Harvard since 1997. Greenblatt's studies of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature in the 1980's -- including Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1984) and Shakespearean Negotations (1988) -- established the critical paradigm known as New Historicism. Greenblatt is widely regarded as the father of New Historicism, and his books remain models of this type of criticism. Greenblatt has published ten books and dozens of articles; his most recent book is Hamlet in Purgatory (2001). While at Berkeley, Greenblatt founded the interdisciplinary journal Representations, which continues to publish important articles by New Historicist critics.