Seth Lerer

Guggenheim Fellow

Recipient of Nation Book Critics Circle Award

Seth Lerer joined the Literature Department in January 2009 as Distinguished Professor and as Dean of Arts and Humanities. His teaching and research address Medieval and Renaissance Literature, the History of the English Language, Children’s Literature, and the history of the book. Most recently, he has been working on Shakespeare

Books

• Shakespeare's Lyric Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

• Tradition: A Feeling for the Literary Past (Oxford University Press, 2016).

• Prospero’s Son: Life, Love, Books, and Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

• The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009).

• Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). [National Book Critics Circle Prize in Criticism, 2009; Truman Capote Prize in Literary Criticism, 2010; translated into Spanish and Korean]

• Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

• Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). [Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association, 2005]

• Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; paperback 2006).

• Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; paperback, 1996). [Beatrice White Prize, The English Association of Great Britain, 1995]

• Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).

• Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the Consolation of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). [Honorable Mention, John Nicholas Brown Prize. Medieval Academy of America, 1989]

Selected Articles & Book Chapters

• “Anthologies: Kenneth Grahame and the Landscapes of Children's Verse,” in Louise Joy and Kate Wakely-Mulroney, eds., The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 243-55. 

• “Hamlet’s Boyhood,” in Deanne Williams and Richard Price, eds., Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp.17-36.

• “What Was Medieval English?” in Tim W. Machan, ed., Imagining Medieval English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp.15-33.

• “‘The Tongue’: Chaucer, Lydgate, Charles D’Orléans and the Making of a Late Medieval Lyric,” The Chaucer Review 49 (2015): 474-98.

• “Bibliographical Theory and the Textuality of the Codex: Towards a History of the Pre-Modern Book,” in Michael Van Dussen and Michael Johnston, eds., The Cultures of the Medieval Manuscript Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp.17-33.

• “Children’s Literature,” in Michael Saler, ed., The Fin-de-siècle World (New York: Routledge, 2015): 691-705.

• “Hamlet’s Poem to Ophelia and the Theater of the Letter,” ELH 81(2014): 841-63.

• “Cultivation and Inhumation: Some Thoughts on the Cultural Impact of Tottel’s Miscellany,” in Stephen Hamrick, ed., Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Press, 2013), pp.147-161.

• “What Chaucer Did to Shakespeare: Books and Bodkins in Hamlet and The Tempest,” (with Deanne Williams), Shakespeare, The Journal of the British Shakespeare Association 8 (2012): 1-13.

• “Sir Orfeo, Line 285: An Emendation,” Notes and Queries n.s., 59 (2012): 320-22.

• “Devotion and Defacement: Reading Children’s Marginalia,” Representations 118 (2012): 126 53.

• “Literary Prayer and Personal Possession in a Newly-Discovered Tudor Book of Hours,” Studies in Philology 109 (2012): 409-28.

• “Auerbach’s Shakespeare,” Philological Quarterly 90 (2011): 21-44.

• Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1981

• M.A., Oxford University, 1986

• B.A., Oxford University 1978

• B.A., Wesleyan University, 1976