Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Seth Lerer
Bicentennial Beginnings - The American Scholar
Write what you know, the high school guidance counselor said to us 50 years ago. Write about your passions and your loves, your books and your goals. I wrote about my love of the English language, about Beowulf and kennings, and about how I would try to capture something of these old sounds in my own poetry. I applied to six schools. Five thin letters came back. The only college that accepted me was Wesleyan.
A Year in Reading: Uwem Akpan
This year, the year I finally finished my historical novel, New York, My Village, my reading has mainly revolved around African historical novels and mainly from Anglophone Africa. I've read some of these books before, and others I was reading for the first time. It was a limited tour of our diverse and precious continent; there is so much out there.
Back to School - The American Scholar
Lauren Finkel (Flickr/-followthemusic-) In the fall of 1978, I entered the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Chicago. I showed up with a suitcase of corduroys and button-downs, an electric typewriter, and six boxes of books. Accreted out of undergraduate surveys and two years of a philology degree at Oxford, their contents ran over the mere six feet of shelving in my dorm room.
Seth Lerer: "My Summer of Julien Gracq"
The odor of stasis hung over our quarantine. In spite of the political resistance in the cities, the actions of the street last summer was one of official inertia. In my hometown of San Diego, a battleship smoldered in the harbor, slowly sinking in the silt. The fire’s out now. Deck and curb have been swept clean. But in other ways little has truly changed. We’re sitting still, waiting for someone to tell us, “This was then,” to sound an all-clear.
The Patience of the Hand: On Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power and Our Current Crisis
No one knew quite what to do with it when it first appeared. Published in German in 1960, Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht) presented itself as the culmination of decades of research and reflection on the inner nature of humankind and on the social manifestations of that nature. Canetti himself — a Bulgarian, secular Jew, raised in England and Germany, born in 1905 — lived through some of the 20th century’s most dazzling and deadly unions of the two terms of its title.
The History of English and the Pedagogy of Belonging
APRIL 23, 2019 IN THE FALL of 1981, I joined the Princeton English Department as an assistant professor. The department, at that time, had nearly 40 faculty, five of whom were medievalists. There were two courses on Old English, three on Chaucer and his age, and, every year, one on the history of the English language.
Beasts at Bedtime
Talking lions, philosophical bears, very hungry caterpillars, wise spiders, altruistic trees, companionable moles, urbane elephants: this is the magnificent menagerie that delights our children at bedtime. Within the entertaining pages of many children’s books, however, also lie profound teachings about the natural world that can help children develop an educated and engaged appreciation of the dynamic environment they inhabit.
History of the English Language, 2nd Edition
Sixteen centuries ago a wave of settlers from northern Europe came to the British Isles speaking a mix of Germanic dialects thick with consonants and complex grammatical forms. Today we call that dialect Old English, the ancestor of the language nearly one in five people in the world speaks every day. How did this ancient tongue evolve into the elegant idiom of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Twain, Melville, and other great writers?
Book reading: Seth Lerer at Warwick's
Seth Lerer is a literature professor at UC San Diego whose specialties include the history of the book. His latest, “Tradition,” is an exploration of the meaning and value of reading. What does literature do to and for us? What does it mean to have a “literary canon” when cultural norms are shifting? Lerer discusses writers old (Dickens) and new (Rushdie) and shows how their ability to read — closely, critically— shaped them.
Ideas for an Information Age
News Values is a concise, powerful statement of the fundamental issues, ethical and practical, confronting newspapers today. Jack Fuller not only makes those issues clear, but offers a provocative new perspective on questions journalists should be asking themselves now in order to prepare for tomorrow. "Every talk show host should read this book. So should every newsroom cynic. . . .
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Seth
Contact Seth, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack