Seth Lerer

Seth Lerer, Professor of Literature, was educated at Wesleyan University, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. He joined the UCSD faculty as Dean of Arts and Humanities and Distinguished Professor of Literature in January 2009, after twenty-eight years of teaching at Princeton and Stanford. His research and teaching has focused on medieval and early modern literature and culture, children’s literature, and the history of the English language. Awards and honors for his work include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Truman Capote Prize in Literary Criticism.

“The Verve: How We Became Modern"

His lecture explores the ways in which human beings came to be represented in literature, art, and culture as individuals: feeling, knowing, and expressive subjects. The modern human in society emerged out the matrix of scientific inquiry, global exploration and colonization, and nation-state formation. From roughly 1500 to 1700, the “self” emerged in Western society as a similar subject of inquiry and exploration, culminating in the ideal of an examined life as a goal of civilized experience.