Karl Zender was born in the hills of Southern Ohio, a region to which he occasionally dreams of returning. He was educated at Case Institute of Technology, Western Reserve University, and the University of Iowa. He has taught at Washington University in St. Louis, at the University of Vienna (as a "Gastprofessor"), and, since 1973, at the University of California at Davis; he served as chair of the department from 1993 to 1998. His wife, Lynn, is a psychiatric social worker and a tireless advocate of services for the homeless. They have two grown sons, Matt and Jake, Matt in the Monterey area, Jake in Truckee.  Matt and his wife, Renee, have given them two lovely grandsons, Zack and Aaron, who every summer come up to Davis for a week of Grandparent Camp.  Karl Zender's main research and teaching interests are the fiction of William Faulkner and the drama of William Shakespeare. 

Publication Spotlight
Professor Zender recently completed Shakespeare, Midlife and Generativity, (LSU Press), a study of relations between the generations in several of Shakespeare's late plays.  In the words of Robert Watson, author of The Rest is Silence:  Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance, the book “illuminates Shakespeare’s lessons about aging without reducing the plays to those lessons. . . . Through it all, Karl Zender’s personal voice intervenes in measured ways---effectively, modestly, refreshingly, and sometimes quite movingly.”

Publication Spotlight

Faulkner and the Politics of Reading
 by Karl Zender

Part of Louisiana State University Press's prestigious Southern Literary Studies series, Faulkner and the Politics of Reading offers fresh readings of individual novels, themes, and motifs while also assessing the impact of recent politicized interpretations on an understanding of William Faulkner's fiction. The book was selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title for 2003" by Choice magazine.

Email: kfzender@ucdavis.edu