The first time I met Dr. Leah Schwebel was when she walked into my undergraduate Chaucer class and talked about The Canterbury Tales as if there was nothing else in the world more important than literature. We were studying a variety of tales from Chaucer’s famous The Canterbury Tales, which I was not familiar with at the time, when she asked the class “what did you think of the Wife of Bath’s Tale?”
Confident about reading and analysis of the tale, I proudly raised my hand and spoke, “I was really surprised by how pro-feminist this tale was.”
She looked at me, a twinge of excitement building up on her face, and stated, “I am going to prove you wrong.”
That is when I knew I had found myself in the presence of my future mentor. Dr. Schwebel has this magical way of igniting the love of reading literature in her students. I was hooked on her teaching style and enthusiastic to learn everything she could offer. As an undergraduate student, I took three courses with Dr. Schwebel and wrote my honors thesis under her guidance.
Dr. Schwebel’ s primary research focus is studying the ways in which Chaucer translated Italian poets and how those Italian poets translated Latin poets. She is interested in the ways in which every generation retells stories that came before them and authors recreate and transmit familiar narratives, such as those of Thebes and Troy. Understanding signs of one author’s work in another, as well as capturing the ways in which an author makes a story their own, is her aim.
At Texas State University, Dr. Schwebel teaches several courses, including a graduate and undergraduate seminar on Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio, and the Development of English. She was a recipient of the 2018 Research Enhancement Project grant, and a three-time recipient of Alpha Chi Honor Society’s favorite professor Award. She was tenured in 2020. Dr. Schwebel’s presence goes beyond being an instructor and a renowned researcher. Her book on Chaucer and the Italian tradition is in its final stages of revision and will soon go into production, and she is working on an article about exemplarity and the figure of Griselda in medieval literature. Her personal hobbies include carpentry, triathlon, and cooking. She is currently training for a half ironman in December and a marathon in March. She lives with her wife, chef Jo Chan, and their two dogs, Luna and Blue, in Austin.
During the summer of 2022, Dr. Leah Schwebel taught a graduate seminar on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which I attended as a student. A focal point of this class was our Commentary Project, which we developed alongside our study of the medieval commentary tradition, and particulary commentaries on Dante’s work. Examples of commentaries on the Divine Comedy include databases such as Digital Dante, Dartmouth Dante Project, Princeton Dante Project, and more. Commentaries present us with a wealth of questions and interpretative challenges. Databases which preserve these commentaries allow the Divine Comedy to stay relevant across centuries. Dr. Schwebel recognizes that there is a wealth of knowledge on Dante, which makes students “sometimes feel like their interpretation or reading is insignificant or doesn’t have value.”
Using the online nature of the seminar, Dr. Schwebel proposed that the students work on a semester long project: writing an online, English commentary on The Divine Comedy. One of the major challenges for students studying The Divine Comedy is the lack of commentary or scholarly research accessible in English (most commentaries are in Latin and Italian). As a student, it was our undertaking to research existing scholarship on Dante’s Divine Comedy, in particular on the Inferno, and to develop our very own collaborative commentary on the work. My peers and I agreed that the best method of compilation was to make our own website. In a span of eight weeks, we were able to create The Divine Comedy Humanities Project website and successfully gather multiple research efforts to compile commentary on all 30 Cantos of the Inferno. The goal of The Divine Comedy Humanities Project is to separate each canto and provide research and analysis for every single line.
The focus for this project was divided into individual interests of the class. Students focused on Historical analysis, Greek/Roman Allusions, Feminist analysis, Musical analysis, and more. The breadth of our interest allowed us to incorporate our own interpretation of the text. Dr. Schwebel explained that this project was a way to take advantage of the online nature of the course and produce a collaborative project that exploits the varying strengths of the students. Dr. Schwebel’ s goal is to have many of her students- both graduate and undergraduate- to contribute towards the expansive possibilities of commentaries on the Divine Comedy. What is more, it always going to be an “un-finished project.” New scholars, new readers, and new students will all bring new interpretations, and this commentary website has space for them all.
As a student in the Dante seminar course, I was able to engage with the text in ways that I had never though possible before. My focus for the project was on Greco-Roman mythology and political allusions. Often, I found myself in rabbit holes learning so much about the world that Dante drew his influence on. I was stunned to learn the literary and historical depth that Dante weaves into his writing. I had taken a course on Dante as an undergraduate before, but the graduate seminar opened doors for me in multiple intellectual ways. As an undergrad my engagement with the text relied heavily on analysis and interpretation, whereas in the graduate seminar Dr. Schwebel really encouraged me to be more authoritative in engaging with the text. Something that I learned in this class was how to be confident in MY interpretation of The Divine Comedy- which is a very daunting task to do given the predecessors on commentary. Overall, this course was one of my favorite seminars I have taken (outside of Chaucer) and I am so lucky to have grown alongside Dr. Schwebel’s mentorship!
Amrin Madhani is student in the M.A. in Literature Program and currently works an Undergraduate Admissions Counselor at Texas State University.