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Office of the Dean
Division of Arts and Humanities
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive # 0406
La Jolla, CA 92093-0406
tel: (858) 534-6270
fax: (858) 534-0091
dean-ah@ucsd.edu
Seth Lerer
Distinguished Professor of Literature
Dean, Arts and Humanities
University of California, San Diego
Click here for current office hours
Click here for Lerer news items and events
Seth Lerer was appointed Distinguished Professor of Literature and Dean of Arts and Humanities in January 2009. Previously, he was a member of the Stanford University faculty where he had a joint professorial appointment in English and Comparative Literature and was the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities.
He received a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1976, a B.A. from Oxford University in 1978, an M.A. from Oxford University in 1978, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1981. His research and teaching interests include medieval and Renaissance studies, comparative philology, the history of scholarship, and children's literature. In 1993, he received the Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford, and in 2003 he received a Dean's Award for Graduate Teaching. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 1996, he was the Hurst Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, in 2002 he was the Helen Cam Visiting Scholar in Medieval Studies at Cambridge University, and in 2007-08 he was the Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library. He has published over one hundred articles and reviews and is the author of seven books: Boethius and Dialogue (Princeton, 1985); Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Nebraska, 1991); Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton, 1993; awarded the Beatrice White Prize of the English Association of Great Britain); Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1997); and Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (Columbia, 2002) (awarded the 2005 Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association); Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia, 2007); and Children's Literature: A Reader's History (Chicago, 2008). In addition to these books, he has edited four collections of essays: Literary History and the Challenge of Philology (Stanford, 1996), Reading from the Margins (The Huntington Library, 1996), The Yale Companion to Chaucer (Yale, 2006), and (with Leah Price) a special issue of PMLA on "The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature" (January 2006).
Lerer PDF CV
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Images from Dinner at the Library on September 17, 2009. Geisel Library, UCSD. |
•Green Faculty Club guest speaker on November 18, 2009 at 4pm
•Bronowski Art & Science Forum guest speaker on November 5, 2009 at 6:30pm
•Featured in LA Times article about Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are". (10.22.09)
•Dinner in the Library with Lerer as guest speaker, Sept 17th.
•Oakland Tribune article about Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are". (9.9.09)
•"Ten Questions" from La Jolla Light. (8.26.09)
•Op-ed piece in The Jewish Week mentions Willows. (8.26.09)
•"From Homer to Harry Potter" in The Vancouver Sun. (8.7.09)
•Review of Willows in New York Times. (7.10.09)
•Review of Willows in London Times Literary Supplement. (6.24.09)
•Review of Willows in Washington Post. (6.17.09)
•Harvard University Press podcast about Willlows. (6.12.09)
•Book signing at Warwick's in La Jolla. (6.3.09)
•Review of Willows in Star Tribune. (5.18.09)
•Review of Willows in Forbes. (5.8.09)
•The Spanish translation of Lerer's "Children's Literature" now available. (5.6.09)
•Spanish language article entitled ¿Si tú lees, ellos leen? (If you read, would they read?) (5.5.09)
•Dean Lerer writes San Francisco Chronicle book review of Finding Oz. (5.1.09)
•Review of Wind in the Willows from Newsweek. (4.30.09)
•Book Buzz from USA Today. (4.30.09)
•Dean Seth Lerer's book "Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter" wins the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism. The honor was bestowed at a ceremony in New York City. Click here for a video interview with Dean Lerer. (3.16.09)
•Seth Lerer - 'cartographer' of children's literature. (3.9.09)
•"Ten Questions" from the Del Mar Times. (2.20.09)
•DAH Link Newsletter - Meet the Dean edition. (2.17.09)
•"Children's Literature" named a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. (1.26.09)
•San Diego Union Tribune Q & A. (9.4.08)
•KPBS' These Days. (8.20.08)
•On NPR - "From Aesop to Harry Potter." (7.2.08)
•UCSD News item - Lerer named Dean of DAH. (6.20.08)
