Seth Lerer

Seth Lerer (born 1955) is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego, where he served as Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014 . He had previously held the Avalon Foundation Professorship in Humanities at Stanford University. Lerer specializes in historical analyses of the English language, in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, including in particular Geoffrey Chaucer. Lerer won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Children’s Literature: A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York City, and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University in 1976. He gained a second Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Oxford in 1978. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree by the University of Chicago in 1981. He taught at Princeton University from 1981 to 1990 and at Stanford from 1991 to 2008. In 2009, he joined the faculty of UC-San Diego as Dean of Arts and Humanities and Distinguished Professor of Literature.

He has received grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Huntington Library. In 1996 he was the Hurst Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2002 he was the Helen Cam Fellow in Medieval Studies at Cambridge University. In 2015 he was the Keeley Visiting Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. In 2016 he served as the M. H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cornell University.

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