Seth Lerer

Seth Lerer is the Dean of Arts and Humanities and Distinguished Professor of Literature at UCSD. Before joining the UCSD faculty in 2009, he was the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Stanford. Lerer was born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Wesleyan, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. Children’s Literature, featured in his Rorotoko interview, won the National Book Critics Award in Criticism in for 2008 and the Truman Capote Award in Literary Criticism in 2010. Lerer is also the author or editor of numerous other books—including Chaucer and His Readers, Error and the Academic Self, Inventing English—and articles and reviews in the fields of medieval literature and the history of scholarship. He is well known, too, for his public lectures on language and culture and his Teaching Company lecture series, The History of the English Language. Throughout his scholarship and teaching, Lerer focuses on the ways in which we see the world through language, and how reading, schooling, and political debate foster a literate imagination.