Renaissance scholar, critic and author Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University will give the 22nd annual Gottschalk Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Cornell University Department of English, Wednesday, March 28, at 7 p.m. in Hollis Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall, on campus. His topic will be "Resisting Materialism," and the talk is free and open to the public.

Greenblatt began his career at the University of California-Berkeley, where he taught for 28 years. He came to Harvard in 1997 and has recently been named the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities. A world-renowned critic and scholar of Renaissance literature, he is known as the founder of what has come to be called the "New Historicism."

Of his work, Greenblatt says: "My deep, ongoing interest is in the relation between literature and history, the process through which certain remarkable works of art are at once embedded in a highly specific life-world and seem to pull free of that life-world."

Author of 10 books, including the forthcoming Hamlet in Purgatory , Greenblatt is at work on two more. One of these projects, a study of William Shakespeare, explores, "how a young man from a small provincial English town, a man without independent wealth, without powerful family connections and without a university education became the greatest playwright not only of his age but of all time," according to Greenblatt.

Greenblatt is currently the associate general editor of the Norton Anthology of British Literature , for half a century the pre-eminent work of its kind and which was founded by Cornell professor emeritus M. H. Abrams, who continues to serve as its general editor.

The Gottschalk Memorial Lecture was established in memory of Paul Gottschalk, professor of English at Cornell, scholar of British Renaissance literature and author of The Meanings of Hamlet (1972). Gottschalk died in 1977 at the age of 38.