The 2016 Charles W. Mann Jr. Lecture in the Book Arts will be held on Thursday, March 31, at 4:30 p.m. in the Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library. Seth Lerer, distinguished professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego, will deliver a talk titled “Children’s Literature and the Art of the Book.” Professor Lerer’s lecture will explore the relationship between the imaginative world of children’s literature and the physical world of the book. He will bring together his work on medieval literature and children’s books to argue that the art of the book is not simply a question for the modern children’s author; it is a question for the reader of the old book, inspired to imagine things anew from the pictures on ancient pages.

Lerer’s teaching and research address medieval and Renaissance literature, the history of the English language, children’s literature, and the history of the book. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter. His most recent book is Prospero’s Son: Life, Love, Books, and Theater (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

There will be a reception following the lecture in the Mann Assembly Room, 103 Paterno Library. An exhibition, “Playing to Learn, Learning as Play: 17th- to 19th-Century ‘Play-Things’ for Children,” will be open for the reception and on display in The Eberly Family Special Collections Library, 104 Paterno Library, through June 3, 2016.