Lerer

National Book Critics Circle Award-winning scholar Seth Lerer will deliver this year’s M.H. Abrams Lecture, “The English Lyric: Medieval to Early Modern,” Thursday, Oct. 20, at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public; a reception will follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall.

Lerer, the fall 2016 M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cornell, is teaching a class on Chaucer and a seminar on the medieval lyric this semester in the Department of English. He is the distinguished professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he was dean of arts and humanities from 2009 to 2014.

In recent scholarship and criticism, the topic of the lyric has served as a center for questions about what literature is and how it changes. Lerer’s talk will show the passage of this small poetic form across a major divide of literary and cultural history. He will discuss the early modern period’s creative readings of medieval lyric forms and propose a revised idea of “periods” based on continuities of language, social function and authorial identity in 15th- and 16th-century England.

Lerer’s scholarship encompasses formalist studies and close readings, and new kinds of cultural, linguistic and literary history, from Boethius to Harry Potter and “The Wind in the Willows,” which he edited for a 2009 annotated edition. His 2008 book “Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter” received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His most recent book is “Tradition: A Feeling for the Literary Past” (2016).

Highlighted by these and several other award-winning studies of medieval, Renaissance and later English literature, Lerer’s work has repeatedly challenged the limits of specialized “periods,” from his first book, a study of the early medieval “Consolation of Philosophy” by Boethius, to a book on Chaucer and his 15th- and 16th-century readers, and his 2003 analysis of the scholarly imagination, “Error and the Academic Self,” winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize. Lerer has also written books on literacy in Anglo-Saxon literature, letter writing and poetry in the court of Henry VIII, and on the history of the English language, a topic he has also presented in lectures for The Great Courses audio and video series.

Lerer’s “consistently fascinating and impeccably elegant investigations of so wide a range of literary cultures, languages and genres show he is one of the premier humanists of our time,” said Andrew Galloway, professor and acting chair of English.

The M.H. Abrams Visiting Professorship was established in 2006 by Stephen H. Weiss ’57, in honor of Meyer H. “Mike” Abrams, the late Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus.