Associate Dean of the Honors College, Associate Professor of English, UVM
Lisa Schnell has been at UVM in the English Department since 1992. Her scholarly work has mainly to do with the literary and cultural lives and ambitions of women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, though her most recent project combines some of her early modern interests with contemporary theories of narrative, cognitive neuroscience, and the work of mourning.
At UVM, Professor Schnell has taught courses in the English Department on Shakespeare, Milton, Renaissance literature, the Bible as literature, and literary theory and criticism. For several years, she taught a sophomore seminar in the Honors College called “Telling Stories: Truth and Narrative” in which students read work in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience and narrative theory together with several novels that engaged and complicated the sense of “self” that the nonfiction reading presented. Several of those issues have found their way into the first-year Honors College course, “The Pursuit of Knowledge,” a class Professor Schnell has greatly enjoyed teaching since its inauguration in the Fall of 2008.
Before becoming the Associate Dean of the Honors College, Professor Schnell served for several years as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English; she also served a one-year term as Acting Director of the John Dewey Honors Program in the College of Arts and Sciences.