Please join us for a conversation with Seth Lerer, Distinguished Professor of Literature Emeritus at the University of California at San Diego, on Friday, November 8 at 3:10 in Crosby Ballroom B.
Lerer has lectured and published widely on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, The History of the English Language, Children’s Literature, and literary and cultural criticism. His published books include: Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton, 1993), which won the Beatrice White Prize of the English Association of Great Britain; Error and the Academic Self (Columbia, 2002), which won the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association; Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago, 2008), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Truman Capote Prize in Criticism; Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (revised edition, Columbia 2015); and the memoir, Prospero’s Son (Chicago, 2013). His latest book, Introducing the History of the English Language, appeared from Routledge in 2024.
In a career of over forty years, Seth Lerer has taught at Princeton, Stanford, and the University of California at San Diego, where he also served as Dean of Arts and Humanities. He has held visiting professorships at Berkeley, Cornell, Washington University in St. Louis, and most recently Claremont-McKenna College. Lerer has lectured and published widely on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, The History of the English Language, Children’s Literature, and literary and cultural criticism. Among his published books are: Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton, 1993), which won the Beatrice White Prize of the English Association of Great Britain; Error and the Academic Self (Columbia, 2002), which won the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association; Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago, 2008), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Truman Capote Prize in Criticism; Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (revised edition, Columbia 2015); and the memoir, Prospero’s Son (Chicago, 2013). His latest book, Introducing the History of the English Language, appeared from Routledge in 2024. He is currently writing a biography of Boethius for the Yale University Press Ancient Lives series.