Sheila Fisher received her B.A. summa cum laude with Highest Honors in English from Smith College, where she majored in English and Latin, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University.  She joined the English Department at Trinity in 1984 and served as Chair of the Department from 2004-2008.  As a medievalist who specializes in Chaucer, late fourteenth-century English literature, and medieval women writers, Sheila has published a book on Chaucer and articles on the Gawain-poet and medieval romance, as well as co-editing a volume of feminist contextual essays on medieval and renaissance writings.  She is currently at work on a poetic translation of the greatest hits of The Canterbury Tales.

The winner of the Prize Teaching Fellowship at Yale and the Brownell Prize for Distinguished Teaching at Trinity, Sheila believes that the richest and most challenging teaching in her field engages students fully in the complexities and difficulties of the text, at the same time that it cultivates in them ways of asking hard questions of the works they examine.  She is convinced that she can convince anyone that s/he can read Chaucer in Middle English and have fun doing it.