Featured Speaker

Seth Lerer
Distinguished Professor of Literature
Dean, Arts and Humanities
University of California, San Diego

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, NY, and educated at Wesleyan, Oxford, and the University of Chicago.

He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Chaucer and His Readers, Error and the Academic Self, Inventing English, and Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. In addition to these books, Lerer has published many articles and reviews in the fields of medieval literature and the history of scholarship. But he is perhaps best known 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. The making of that literate imagination is the theme of his book Children's Literature, which won the National Book Critics Award in Criticism in for 2008. He also just released an annotated version of the children's classic, Wind in the Willows.

In addition to pursuing his current duties as Dean, Lerer hopes to teach a course on the History of the English Language in the spring of 2010 and to teach in the Revelle College Humanities Program in the near future.

Inventing English, 2007 Children's Literature : A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter, 2008 The Wind in the Willows, 2009