Professor Sheila Fisher
Professor of English (Emerita)
Professor Fisher began her impressive collegiate career at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Here, she majored in English and Latin and became the first person in her family to attend college, earning high honors along the way. After Smith, she earned M.A., M.Phil., and from Yale in New Haven, Connecticut.
As a child, Professor Fisher was already touched by a love for both literature and language. She describes herself as a diligent and hard worker, which she attributes to an admiration for the hard work she observed in her parents. Her parents spent time renovating 18th century homes and worked with many antique items in the process. Watching her parents’ work gave Professor Fisher both a familiarity with what she describes as the “old” hard work and an admiration for diligence. Professor Fisher grew up loving to read imaginative literature and writing creatively. She was also always drawn to teaching, and originally dreamed of becoming a school teacher, before ( as she puts with a chuckle), “ [she] realized professors also wrote.” Her love for reading and school blossomed into a scholarship at a prestigious highschool where she found her third love: language. While in high school, she studied French and quickly realized her passion for translation.
At Smith, Professor Fisher struggled at first between her academic passions. How could she ever find a field that allowed her to study classics, translate languages, and maintain an academic seriousness? Certainly, English could not provide everything she wanted to achieve. Not to mention that English was shoved to the side as a “woman’s major” because it did not involve “tough stuff” like math and science. Where was she to turn as a woman and a scholar? Then came Chaucer. Professor Fisher describes her initial delight reading Chaucer as partly a surprise. It required the translation she had been craving, and once the work was translated, more surprises awaited. As Professor Fisher puts it, “fourteenth-century literature can be self-consciousness about itself and about how it plays with a wide variety of literary genres. Also, Chaucer can be very funny. Contradictions are abound in his texts, and instead of trying to reconcile them, we get to accept them as they come.”
As a Professor, Fisher seeks to bring her love for medieval literature to everyone. She claims that she can make anyone enjoy reading Chaucer. If you ask her students, she is totally right. In her classes students can expect to be challenged, but also to laugh. Another big part of Professor Fisher’s teaching methods is her emphasis on place. Fisher maintains that one of the best ways to study culture, lifestyle, history, and overall texture of a space is to immerse oneself in it. Student’s in her Medieval Women Writers and Humanities Gateway program enjoy a field trip once a semester to the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, CT. Fisher believes that this trip provides students with a deeper experience than studying a place only in a classroom.
She also feels that travelling is important to her own research. Professor Fisher recently travelled to England in order to gain insight for her new book on the medieval mystic, Margary Kemp. Professor Fisher feels excited about writing her first historical novel, as she engages with the form for the first time. She maintains that the imaginative aspects of a historical novel will allow her to gain more personal access to the inside mind of Kemp. She also feels that the form will provide her with a fun and a creative body of work, but also a deeply informative and serious look at medieval mystics. In a way, her book is another symbol of how accessible, entertaining, and creative medieval literature and studies can be.
Here at Trinity, Professor Fisher is an essential part of our community. She describes the English department as “devoted, loving, imaginative, and creative” with an incredible teaching staff. Professor Fisher’s classes provide students with an opportunity to become better close readers, thoughtful students, and deft scholars through the lense of medieval literature.
Somewhat surprisingly, Professor Fisher also teaches a class on Prison Literature. The connection? Fisher maintains that medieval women allow us to reconsider what feminism looks like. We become more aware of how social structures and influence affect activism. This same mindset provides us with a compassionate and complex lense to consider the plight of those writing from our prison systems. As a community, we value Professor Fisher’s excitement to help her students become better researchers. We celebrate with her when a thesis student finally presents their work. We admire her continued academic diligence. Most of all, we feel grateful that she is a part of the English Department family.
