People

Previous | Next

Brenda Deen Schildgen

Program Director
Professor of Comparative Literature
Ph.D., Indiana University, Bloomington

2008 Recipient, Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement
2001 Winner, Outstanding Teacher Award

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Email: bdschildgen@ucdavis.edu
Phone: 530.752.9558
Office: 811 Sproul Hall
Office Hours

Introduction
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.

Research and Teaching Interests

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

Education:

  • 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

Selected Publications

  • Heritage or Heresy: Destruction and Preservation of Art and Architecture in Europe (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008)
  • Medieval Readings of Romans, co-edited with William S. Campbell and Peter S. Hawkins (T & T Clar, 2007)
  • Other Renaissances, co-edited volume with Gang Zhou and Sander Gilman (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007)
  • Power and Prejudice: Reception of the Gospel of Mark (Wayne State, 1999), Choice best book award in 1999
  • Dante and the Orient (Illinois, 2002)
  • Pagans, Tartars, Jews, and Moslems in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Florida, 2001)
  • Co-editor, The Rhetoric Canon (1997), Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (2000), Other Renaissances (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006), and Medieval Readings of Romans (Edinburgh, 2006).
  • Co-editor, The World of Fables