Eric Schroeder

Dr. Schroeder received a Bachelor’s degree in English literature and classical Greek from UCLA in 1976 and a Masters of Arts in Renaissance Studies from Sussex University in Brighton, England in 1977. He returned to UCLA where, in 1984, he completed his doctorate in which he examined American literary responses to the Vietnam war.  He was initially hired by UC Davis in the fall of 1984 to teach adjunct writing courses (UWP 102) for the Campus Writing Center, and in that capacity he taught writing classes for students in a wide range of disciplines, including engineering, computer science, genetics, psychology, political science, history, African-American studies, and philosophy. In addition to these discipline-specific writing courses, he also has taught a variety of other writing class, from lower-division courses (UWP 1, 3, and 19) to advanced composition (UWP 101) and professional writing—technical and business writing (UWP 104A), journalism (UWP 104C) and writing for teachers (UWP 104D).  Literature courses he has taught include Introduction to American Literature, Twentieth Century American Literature, and Special Topics in American Literate—The Vietnam War.

Dr. Schroeder also taught courses in the American Studies Program between 1989 and 2007 and  in the Integrated Studies Honors Program from 1990 to 2009. For American Studies he taught classes on popular culture (AMS 130), symbols and rituals in American life (AMS 155) and the 1960s (AMS 110).  He also taught a course on American autobiography, another on the 1890s, and seminars on the Vietnam war, Las Vegas, and the architecture of Disney (the latter two featured field trips).  For Integrated Studies (the residential first-year honors program) he taught an interdisciplinary course on the Vietnam War and for many year he taught a course in which students mounted a full-scale production of a Shakespeare play each spring—he directed 13 of these plays in the course of his career.

He maintains an active interest in representations of the Vietnam war in American culture, having published articles and reviews on this subject.  His book, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, was published in 1992, and in 1995 he organized an international conference, “Vietnam Legacies: Twenty Years Later” on the Davis campus.  He is a co-founder and former senior editor of Writing on the Edge, a journal about writing and the teaching of writing that is published at Davis, and a co-founder and former editor of Prized Writing, an anthology of student writing published annually at UC Davis.

In addition to his teaching duties, from 2004 until 2014 Dr. Schroeder was the director of the UCD Summer Abroad Program, which offers 38 overseas programs in 27 different countries. He taught programs for Summer Abroad in England, Scotland, Australia, and South Africa.