Speaker Michael Kramp on JASP 2026 and the “Humanities Experience”
- Summer Griffin
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
Dr. Michael Kramp of Lehigh University feels like he’s “running a two-minute drill nowadays,” citing a shift in academia "as we try to fight off a bunch of things.”
That urgency is what shapes Kramp's work, and it’s part of what makes him especially excited to join the Jane Austen Summer Program for the first time as a speaker. A longtime Austen scholar whose work began with a focus on men and masculinity—and has since expanded into critical theory—is now focused on a larger question: how can Jane Austen help us rethink the way the humanities and the public interact?
“What most excites me about the program is that I think it is the premier Jane Austen public humanities program,” Kramp said. “I hope that what I can bring is some specific ideas, questions, and engagements about how Jane Austen can help us to think about the humanities.”
For Kramp, that public-facing engagement of the program is essential. He wants to shift how we talk about the humanities. Academia, he argues, has become “obsessed with what’s called ‘assessment’ or trying to evaluate the specific objectives and outcomes of individual courses or fields of study.” While the skills obtained through assessment can be useful, he believes that this framework has “really failed the humanities.”
Instead, he proposes what he calls “humanities experiences” as a part of his “long-term, public-facing project,” titled “Jane Austen and the Future of the Humanities.” This project has many moving parts, including an ongoing podcast and several other mediums of public-facing research, meant to “address what is now at least a sixty-year-old ‘crisis’ in the humanities,” according to Kramp's website.
Rather than organizing Austen’s novels around “measurable objectives,” Kramp frames them through his work around Austen’s display of lasting human experiences—change, transition, and difficult conversations. Pride and Prejudice, this year’s JASP focus, is “replete with issues of change,” according to Kramp, with “Elizabeth changing her mind, Darcy changing his mind,” and an array of other social and cultural changes taking place within the narrative.
“When that happens,” Kramp said, “Austen showcases the ability of people to have really tough conversations […] conversations that are difficult, sometimes painful.” Furthermore, Austen “helps us to do this in ways that are not threatening and very accessible.” For Kramp, that’s one of the most valuable parts of indulging in the humanities: “When we study the humanities, we learn to have really challenging conversations with people who disagree with us.”
Even Kramp’s favorite scene from Pride and Prejudice reflects this interest in reworking “the kind of storytelling we’re engaged in.” He points to the moment in chapter eight, when Caroline Bingley jokes about Charles Bingley buying the Pemberley estate. Kramp specifically pointed to the line: “Upon my word, Caroline, I should think it more possible to get Pemberley by purchase than by imitation.”
The idea that Bingley can even imagine purchasing an ancestral estate is, to Kramp, “monumental, and it suggests a drastic social shift that Austen points to.” Even if it’s said in jest, as many readers might intuit, this reveals “an attitudinal possibility” in Bingley's mind that money could imitate lineage.
For Kramp, Austen is “a brilliant, sophisticated, complex thinker and a sharp cultural critic,” citing one of her greatest authorial gifts as giving “every single character—even the ones we want to say are villainous—levels of complexity.”
That complexity, he believes, is exactly what makes Austen so useful in public conversations today, and a taste of the sort of discussion one might have when attending his lecture at JASP 2026.
And yes, if you were wondering—Kramp will be at the Regency Ball. He’s never dressed in Regency attire before, but he’s “certainly not opposed.”
Registration for JASP 2026 is open!
Pride, Prejudice, and the Pursuit of Happiness will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence through a four-day public humanities program exploring the Enlightenment roots of American democracy and the transatlantic exchange of political ideas. To honor this milestone, JASP is relocating from UNC Chapel Hill to Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania, a state closely associated with the American founding.
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