Johanna Kramer

Office Hours: Fall 2026: Monday 2-3 p.m. (Walk-in and Zoom); Wednesday 11a.m.-12 p.m. (Zoom only); and by appointment. 

Areas of Research and Teaching: Old English language and literature; Anglo-Latin literature; medieval religious literature, esp. early medieval hagiography and homilies; folklore and popular religion; prose writings; proverb studies; history of the English language; history and culture of early medieval England; Germanic languages and literatures

Johanna Kramer (she/her) is interested in all things medieval, particularly in early medieval English literatures and cultures. Her research and teaching focus on Old English and Anglo-Latin religious literature, saints' lives, homilies, expressions of Christian theology, religious practices, and folklore. She also studies the wider medieval world, including Old Norse-Icelandic, Middle English, and continental medieval literatures. Ongoing interests are the influence of patristic theology on later writings, the history of ideas, the intersections of diverse literary cultures and practices, and genres studies. 

Her current book project, expanding beyond the early Middle Ages, examines the use of proverbs and other proverbial materials in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Her study of this neglected but sizable corpus of embedded microtexts argues that proverbs provide opportunities for reflecting on a wide range ethical issues and becomes sites for negotiating tensions between individual (im/a)moral agendas and communal ethics. From this book project, she has published an article on proverbs in the Squire Tale.

Her most recent book publication, a collaborative edition and translation of anonymous Old English prose saints’ lives, appeared in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series: Johanna Kramer, Hugh Magennis, and Robin Norris, eds. and trans., Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 63 (Harvard University Press, 2020). 

Her first monograph, Between Earth and Heaven: Liminality and the Ascension of Christ in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Manchester UP, 2014; paperback 2017), examines how concepts of space, boundaries, and liminality are employed by early medieval authors to teach the theology of the Ascension in a wide range of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. Between Earth and Heaven won the 2016 Best First Book Prize from the Southeastern Medieval Association (SEMA). To learn more about the book and Professor Kramer's research, see this article and video presentation in MU's Illumination Magazine.

At MU, Professor Kramer is a member of the lively and active field of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (MARS). She is faculty advisor for the MARS undergraduate and graduate minors; to learn more about MARS, including the minors, click here.

As part of her interest in source study, she has been supporting the long-term project Sources of Old English and Anglo-Latin Literary Culture (SOEALLC), which aims to produce a comprehensive and descriptive list of all authors known in Britain between ca. 500 and 1100 C.E.

Professor Kramer received her Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Cornell University and has also studied at the University of Munich in Germany, the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK), and Oregon State University (B.A. and M.A. English).

Besides rummaging through dead languages, she enjoys collecting sands and eating German (especially Swabian) foods.