Education and Degrees

Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington
M.A., Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington
M.A., Religious Studies, University of San Francisco
B.A., English and French, University of Wisconsin

Research Interests

European Middle Ages, particularly Southern Europe
Reception theory
The relationship between history and fiction
Biblical hermeneutics
Interpretive theory
Art and Literature

Courses Taught

COM 5. Fairy Tales, Fables, and Parables
COM 6. Myths and Legends
COM 151. Colonial and Postcolonial Experience in Literature
COM 164A. The European Middle Ages
COM 167. Comparative Study of Major Authors: “Dante”
COM 180. Topic: “Medievalism”
COM 210. Graduate Seminar: “The Reception of Virgil’s Aeneid”
ENL 171A. The Bible as Literature

Profile

Brenda Deen Schildgen, 2008 recipient of the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement, specializes in the European Middle Ages, Bible as Literature, Dante, and Jewish, Christian, and Moslem relations in the European Middle Ages. She has a strong secondary interest in colonial and post-colonial literature, especially of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. She is a recipient of numerous fellowships including National Endowment for the Humanities, PEW, Bogliasco Foundation, and the National Humanities Center in 2005-06. Her books include, most recently Heritage or Heresy: Destruction and Preservation of Art and Architecture in Europe (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008), the co-edited volume (with Gang Zhou and Sander Gilman) Other Renaissances; Dante and the Orient; Pagans, Tartars, Moslems and Jews in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Power and Prejudice: The Reception of the Gospel of Mark, which won a Choice Best Book award in 1999, and Crisis and Continuity: Time in the Gospel of Mark. She takes students to Florence, Italy, every summer.