News and Updates

A New Mission: 2009

The UCSD Center for the Humanities was established in 1996 to promote research and other activities in the Humanities. The Center for the Humanities promotes advanced research and interdisciplinary study of the humanities, fosters innovative teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and facilitates a diverse and intensified dialogue of related academic, social, and cultural issues. The Center encourages dialogue between humanities and the arts, social sciences, and the sciences and engineering.

The Center provides annual support for:

• Graduate Student Fellowships
• Faculty Fellowships
• Distinguished Visitors
• Interdisciplinary Research
• Conferences
• Community Outreach

Seth Lerer, Highly Respected Scholar, Teacher and Academic Leader is new
Dean of Arts and Humanities at UC San Diego
Seth Lerer was appointed Distinguished Professor of Literature and Dean of Arts and Humanities at UC San Diego in January 2009. Previously, he was a member of the Stanford University faculty where he was appointed Professor of English in 1990, received a joint appointment in Comparative Literature in 1996, served as Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 1997-2000, and was the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities.
He received a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1976, a B.A. from Oxford University in 1978, an M.A. from Oxford University in 1978, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1981. His research and teaching interests include medieval and Renaissance studies, comparative philology, the history of scholarship, and children's literature. In 1993, he received the Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford, and in 2003 he received a Dean's Award for Graduate Teaching. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 1996, he was the Hurst Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, in 2002 he was the Helen Cam Visiting Scholar in Medieval Studies at Cambridge University, and in 2007-08 he was the Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library. He has published over one hundred articles and reviews and is the author of seven books: Boethius and Dialogue (Princeton, 1985); Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Nebraska, 1991); Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton, 1993; awarded the Beatrice White Prize of the English Association of Great Britain); Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1997); and Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (Columbia, 2002) (awarded the 2005 Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association); Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia, 2007); and Children's Literature: A Reader's History (Chicago, 2008). In addition to these books, he has edited four collections of essays: Literary History and the Challenge of Philology (Stanford, 1996), Reading from the Margins (The Huntington Library, 1996), The Yale Companion to Chaucer (Yale, 2006), and (with Leah Price) a special issue of PMLA on "The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature" (January 2006).
Photo by Dagmar Logie