Ralph Lerner
Jack Miller Center Summer Institute Faculty
Benjamin Franklin Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought and in the College, University of Chicago
Ralph Lerner is the Benjamin Franklin Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought and in the College at the University of Chicago. He attended public school in Chicago, received his degrees in political science at the University of Chicago, and had a year of post-graduate study of medieval Hebrew at the University of Cambridge. He has served in the U.S. Army. All of his teaching has been at the University of Chicago, apart from visiting appointments at Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard universities and a visiting lectureship at the Institute of Raymond Aron. He has received fellowship awards from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Humanities Center. He has received a Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
His books include The Founders’ Constitution (co-edited with Philip B. Kurland), The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic, Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment, Maimonides’ Empire of Light: Popular Enlightenment in an Age of Belief, and Naïve Readings: Reveilles Political and Philosophic. He is the author, most recently, of Untrustworthy Authors: Close Encounters at Sea, in Midstream, and on Land with Herman Melville and Henry Fielding.
Research interests:
Enlightenment
Modes of Writing and Reading
