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.

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