Brenda Deen Schildgen:
Scholarly author motivates students to care about classic works
By Kim Seidel

Brenda Deen Schildgen, an award-winning teacher and author, inspires students to care deeply about long-dead writers. "I try to make them see that the issues they cared about are still relevant today — love, God, morality, war, fraud, deceit, class differences, gender relations, and so on and so forth," said Schilden, an eminent scholar of medieval European literature and biblical studies at the University of California, Davis.

Schildgen works with literature in English, Italian, French, Spanish, Greek and Latin. She has edited or written nine books, five of which are single-authored. She has authored three dozen scholarly articles and more than a dozen invited book or article reviews.

An internationally respected author on Dante, Chaucer and the gospel of Mark, Schildgen has lectured throughout the United States, in India, and the Middle East and Europe. Schildgen's work on Dante, especially on his knowledge and treatment of the Middle East, Islam and India has been especially celebrated.

She's received numerous fellowships, grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and other prestigious organizations.
How does Schildgen meld her expansive work as a scholar into the classroom to motivate her students? "First, I try to be unassuming about my knowledge and emphasize that I have accumulated what I know over many long years," she said. "I have to constantly remind myself of what I did not know when I was an undergraduate. I also encourage students to do a lot of the background research for this older material so they can feel responsible for their own learning and pass it on to the other students in presentations."

Schildgen has been teaching at UC-Davis since 1988. Last spring she was named the 2008 recipient of the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. Funded by the UC Davis Foundation, the $40,000 prize is believed to be the largest undergraduate teaching prize in the nation. The winner is chosen on the recommendations of faculty members, students and research peers.

Schildgen said her teaching and writing endeavors reinforce each other, which enables her to accomplish much in her field. "My research makes me think more about the subjects I teach, just as the teaching makes me get ideas for research," Schildgen said.

Her path to an academic career is thought to be unconventional. She worked for 12 years as a lecturer at UC Davis before she was hired in 2002 as a full professor of comparative literature. This jump isn't the typical climb up the academic ladder.

Out of her line up of prestigious books is also a successful textbook, The World of Fables, co-edited with Georges van den Abbeele. It was published in 2003 by San Francisco: Pacific View Press. At this time, Schildgen said she has no other plans to write another textbook.  She  is currently working on three other book projects, one on popular stories; one on how the Middle Ages was invented in the nineteenth century; and one on Dante's Christian poetics.

Schildgen's Power and Prejudice: Reception of the Gospel of Mark won a Best Academic Book Choice award in 1999. It was published in 1998 by Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Among her more recent critically acclaimed titles are Medieval Readings of Romans, co-edited with Peter Hawkins and William Campbell in the series Romans Through History and Cultures, and published by Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark International in 2007; and Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature, a co-edited collection of essays with Zhou Gang and Sander Gilman, published by Palgrave/Macmillan in 2006.

Also published recently were Medieval Romans, co-edited with Peter Hawkins and William Campbell in the series Romans Through History and Cultures, published by Edinburgh: T & T Clark International in 2007, and Heritage or Heresy: Destruction and Preservation of Religious Images and Artifacts in Europe, published by New York: Palgrave/Macmillan in 2008.

Schildgen served as editor of a collection of essays by international scholars discussing the rhetoric canon from Plato Erasmus. This became her first published book and was published by Detroit: Wayne State University Press in 1997. This book was followed by her next title in 1998, Crisis and Continuity: Time in the Gospel of Mark, published Sheffield Academic Press, England: JSNT.

Next, she was published as co-editor with Leonard Michael Koff of The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, in 2000 by Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

In 2001, Schildgen authored Pagans, Tartars, Jews, and Moslems in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, published by University of Florida Press, and in 2002, Dante and the Orient was published by University of Illinois Press.

In addition to her research and teaching at UC Davis, Schildgen has helped to build the University Writing Program. She is a strong advocate for the development of writing skills, not just in English courses but across all disciplines.

"Writing is central to the work we do as undergraduate teachers," Schildgen said. "By writing, students learn to think critically, to read critically, and to write logically and accurately."

Schildgen considers her work with the University Writing Program to be both central to her career and training as a professional, which is obviously many years of teaching and writing that continue today.

This type of work has been part of her career even before she came to UC. For eight years, she also directed writing programs at the University of San Francisco, and later spent two years as interim director of writing at UC Davis.

Schildgen tries to write every day, and offered this piece of advice for other authors: "Write one page a day, and at the end of the year you will have over 300 pages to work with."

She and her husband Bob Schildgen have been married for more than 40 years and they raised three children, all grown and living in California. Brenda Schildgen is from England, and her husband is from Wisconsin. They met while she was attending UW-Madison, where she earned a bachelor's degree in English and French. She then earned a master's and doctorate in comparative literature at Indiana University and a second master's in religious studies at the University of San Francisco.

Bob Schildgen is also known as the popular Mr. Green, the dear Abby of the environment, for Sierra Magazine.  For many years, he was managing editor and book reviewer for Sierra Magazine, and his book, Hey, Mr. Green, was published in 2008 by Sierra Club Books. "We are avid gardeners and sincere environmentalists," she said. "We also spend a lot of time in Italy, our second home."

— Kim Seidel is a freelance writer based in Onalaska, Wis.