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 2005-2008.  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.  Her Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation, was published by W.W. Norton in Spring 2011 and will be featured in the inaugural series of five translations of major world texts to be published in Spring 2020 as the launch of the new Norton Library Series. She is currently at work on a translation of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and is nearing completion of an historical novel on the medieval English mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. 

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.

Sheila was associate dean of the faculty with primary responsibilities for the curriculum from September 2009-June 2013. Currently, she is co-coordinator of the Humanities Gateway Program. 

Sheila's new area of programming, teaching, and research involves prison studies. She is co-founder and now director of the Trinity Prison Seminar Series, which, since 2012, has offered credit-bearing college-level courses at the York Correctional Institution, the only women's prison in Connecticut, as well as the Free to Succeed Program that offers mentoring to citizens in re-entry as they seek to complete their college education after prison. In addition, Sheila now offers a Community Learning Initiative course, English 209, Prison Literature in her home department. 

• Fisher, Sheila.  The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation.  New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011.
• Fisher, Sheila, and Halley, Janet E. Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism.  Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989.
• Fisher, Sheila. "The Lady Vanishes: The Problem of Women's Absence in Late Medieval and Renaissance Texts," introductory essay, cowritten with Janet E. Halley, in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings, pp. 1-17.
• Fisher, Sheila. "Taken Men and Token Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Essay in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings, pp. 71-105.
• Fisher, Sheila. Chaucer's Poetic Alchemy: A Study of Value and Its Transformation in The Canterbury Tales.  Publications in British and American Literature: Distinguished Dissertations in Literature Series.  New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988.
• Fisher, Sheila. "'Echoing the Sounds of Silence: Teaching Women Writers of the Middle Ages." Feminist Scholarship Review. Hartford: Trinity College, 2002-2003.
• Fisher, Sheila, and Kureger, Roberta L. (eds.) "Women and Men in Late Medieval English Romance," in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, 150-164. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Fisher, Sheila. "Leaving Morgan Aside: History, Revisionism, and Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."  In The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Traditions, edited by Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe, 129-151.  New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988.
• Fisher, Sheila. Essay reprinted in Medieval English Poetry, edited by Stephanie Trigg.  London: Longman, 1993.          
• Fisher, Sheila. Essay reprinted in Arthurian Women: A Casebook, edited by Thelma S. Fenster. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996.

• President's Cornerstone Grant to establish the Trinity College Literature Club and its neighborhood literacy outreach initiative, 2006.
• Mellon Foundation Grant to be a participant in the study of Senior Capstone Experiences, organized by NEASC, 2004-2005.
• Thomas Church Brownell Prize for Teaching Excellence, 2004.
• Faculty Research Leave, Trinity College, for Fall 1998.
• Dean's Grant for Faculty Collaborative Work in sponsorship of participants in the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Faculty Symposium, Trinity College, 1995.
• Junior Faculty Research Leave Grant, Trinity College, 1988.
• Ford Foundation Grant for Women's Studies at Newly Coeducational Schools in sponsorship of participants in The History and Literature Seminar at Trinity College, 1985-1986.
• NEH Summer Seminar Participant, "Chaucer's Language Games: Society as Art in The Canterbury Tales," directed by Robert Hanning at Columbia University, 1985.
• Summer Stipend for Course Development in Women's Studies awarded by the Trinity College Women's Studies and Curriculum Committees, 1985.
• Prize Teaching Fellowship, Yale University, 1980.