Professor Seth Lerer (1955 -) is Dean of Arts and Humanities and Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego. 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.[1]
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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 degree from the University of Oxford in 1978. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree by the University of Chicago in 1981. He was granted a Master of Arts degree by Oxford in 1986. He taught at Princeton University from 1981 to 1990 and at Stanford from 1991-2008. 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.
Professor Lerer's research interests include Medieval Studies, Renaissance studies, comparative philology, history of scholarship and children's literature. He has also published works on the history of reading and the culture of noble courts.[2][3]
Professor Lerer is widely recognised for his capacity as a teacher and his facility in Old and Middle English pronunciation and public reading, including in particular the different dialetic forms of Middle English. Several lecture series delivered by Professor Lerer have been made available commercially.[4]