Professor Seth Lerer 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. 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.
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