Sheila Fisher, professor of English at Trinity College, will give a lecture titled “The Art of Translating Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales” on Thursday, Oct. 6, at 4:10 p.m., in the Science Center’s Kennedy Auditorium. The event is a part of the fall 2011 Humanities Forum and is free and open to the public.
Fisher majored in English and Latin and received her bachelor’s degree in English from Smith College, and her master’s, M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University.
Fisher specializes in teaching about Chaucer, late 14th-century English literature, medieval women writers, and British poetry. Her research interests include Chaucer, translation, and women in the Middle Ages. She is the recipient of the Brownell Prize for Distinguished Teaching at Trinity and the Prize Teaching Fellowship at Yale. Fisher’s latest work is The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation (2011).
The fall 2011 Humanities Forum is addressing the topic of “Translation and Cultural Exchange.” As communication becomes increasingly international via the media, translation - especially language translation - is vital to understanding politics, social life, religion, culture and art. This two-year forum offers multiple perspectives that will challenge audiences to think about how meaningful words, sentences, and paragraphs can be translated from one language to another.
