As Associate Professor in English Literature, Kristine Johanson is a researcher, teacher, and writer. Her first monograph, Shakespeare's Golden Ages: Resisting Nostalgia in Elizabethan Drama,  was published in 2022 as part of Edinburgh University Press's Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture series and reissued in paperback in 2024. In 2023 her course Renaissance Women Writers (co-taught with her PhD student Anna-Rose Shack) was nominated for the Onderwijs Prijs/Faculty Teaching Award and in 2019 her MA course Shakespeare, Sexuality, and Adaptation was a finalist for best MA course in the Humanities and won the Faculty of Humanities' Education-Audience award. Her first short film, Fever Dreams, co-directed with Daniel Hillel-Tuch and written about the first Corona lockdown, premiered in July 2020 and in December won Best Film at the Amsterdams Buurt Film Festival. In 2018 with John Mabey she was commissioned by Orange Theatre Company to write a play about Brexit. That play, The B Word - Strategies for a Graceful Exit, had a sold-out run at the Westergastheater in Amsterdam.

Kristine's scholarship is at work outside of the university as well, and most recently she has appeared on the 'Shakespeare' episode of In Levende Lijve and on NPO1's Spraakmakers programme. She has worked with the Dutch National Opera and Ballet, The Moving Arts Project, the Amsterdam Academisch Club, and the Friends of the Rotterdam Youth Philharmonic Orchestra. Her reviews of Shakespeare adaptations in Amsterdam are available here and here.  

In her research, Kristine is interested broadly both in time in early modernity and in Shakespeare adaptations. This first interest began with her PhD research on nostalgia in early modern drama (which forms the basis of her book). This research also led to the development of a project on the relationship between time and emotion in early modern literature. In 2015 she received a Huntington Library Fellowship for her project, 'Melancholy and the Opportune Moment: Occasio as Mediator of Emotion on the Early Modern English Stage', which forms the basis of that research. In 2016 she was a VIDI finalist for her project 'The Time of Emotions: Regulating the Self in Early Modern English Literature'. Her interest in adaptation emerged from a scholarly edition (begun with Barbara Murray) of adaptations from the early eighteenth century (published in 2014). More recently, her adaptations research has asked, ‘how does modern cinema construct early modern sexuality?’ 

With Joanne Paul (Sussex) and Sarah Lewis (King's College, London), she leads the Grasping Kairos international research network. Kristine has co-founded two research groups in the Amsterdam School for Historical Studies (ASH). With her former colleague Tara MacDonald (University of Idaho), she founded the Emotion and Subjectivity, 1300-1900 group. Kristine and Tara are currently collaborating on an edited collection on feminist utopian fiction in Britain, 1500-1900. With Jeroen Jansen in the Dutch department, Kristine co-founded the Cultural Memory, Rhetoric, and Literary Discourse research group. 

'Regulating Time and the Self in Shakespearean Drama'. In R. Loughnane and E. Semple (Eds.), Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England. (Palgrave, 2019)

“‘Our brains beguiled’: Ecclesiastes and Sonnet 59’s Poetics of Temporal Instability”. In H. Crawforth , E. Scott-Baumann, & C. Whitehead (Eds.), The Sonnets: The State of Play (Bloomsbury, 2017).

In her positive review of the collection in the Times Literary Supplement, Katharine Craik writes that my essay is one that ‘find[s] new ways to illuminate Shakespeare’s own historical moment[…]Kristine Johanson shows how [the Sonnets] draw from Ecclesiastes in order to explore the desirability (and impossibility) of returning to the past’, TLS, 30 January 2018.

Scott F. Crider in The Review of English Studies describes the collection’s essays as ‘intelligent, original and well written’. Reflecting on the readings in the collection’s first section, he writes that ‘it is Johanson’s essay that promises a new direction […] Johanson offers a fascinating reading of [Sonnet] 59’.

Editor, “Approaches to Early Modern Nostalgia,” Parergon 33:2 (2016). This special issue includes my editorial, “On the Possibility of Early Modern Nostalgias” (pp. 1-15) and my essay, “In the Mean Season: Richard II and the Nostalgic Politics of Hospitality” (pp. 57-78).

Editor, Shakespeare Adaptations from the Early Eighteenth Century: Five Plays. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014.

Writing in The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer (2015), Matthew J. Rinkevich positively reviews the edition. ‘As an editor, Johanson proves informative, clear, and—when turning to the plays themselves—laudably unobtrusive […] she provides a far-reaching examination of the English stage and its relationship to the nation’s political and cultural life during the early Hanoverian period, and she constructs an excellent resource for those unfamiliar with the dramatic history of the early eighteenth century.’

Mark Fortier notes in his review, 'Ms. Johanson is a judicious commentator, and her general introduction and introductions to the particular plays are helpful. Shakespeare Adaptations would make for a fine textbook',  The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats 48:2/49:1 (2016), pp. 148-149. 

Noted in ‘Recent studies in the restoration and eighteenth century’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 53:4 (2014).

In the 2019-2020 academic year, I continue to teach early modern literature at the BA and MA levels. These courses include: 

Authors in Focus: Renaissance Women Writers (BA) - An exploration of the works of seventeenth-century women writers, including Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn.

Shakespeare in Focus (BA) - Our department's elective Shakespeare course. Nominated in 2016 for the Onderwijs Prijs.

English Literature 2: Medieval and Early Modern Literature (BA) - Our first-year survey course of early literature from c.1350 to 1700.

Practices of Literature: Literary Cultures and their Impact (Research MA) - My 4-week contribution to this core rMA course focuses on how theatre stages history,  as we examine Shakespeare's Richard III, its source play, and its adaptations. 

Shakespeare for Teachers (MA) - I created this course this year in collaboration with the MasterLanguage programme.

In 2020-21, I will again teach the MA course Shakespeare, Sexuality, and Adaptation. 

I take student support work very seriously, and one of my administrative roles is as tutor, or departmental student adviser. Before coming to the UvA, I participated in student support trainings while I was at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. These included:

March­­–April 2012: HWS Sexual Violence Response Training. Directed by an HWS psychologist, this voluntary program trains faculty and students to respond effectively to students who are survivors of sexual violence.

September 2011: HWS Gatekeepers Training. Provided by HWS psychologists, this voluntary program trained faculty to respond effectively to students in distress and to make appropriate referrals.

Co-organizer and co-leader, ‘Time and Emotion’ seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America conference. 28-31 March 2018, Los Angeles.

‘The Return to Origin as Progressive Theatre: Reflections on Adapting Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Association of America, 5-8 April 2017, Atlanta, GA.

(Invited) ‘400 Jaar Coriolanus van Shakespeare’, University of Amsterdam, 28 January 2017. In Dutch.

‘“A Lost 'Pair of Stainless Maidenheads”: Eradicating Female Desire in Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Association of America, 23-25 March 2016, New Orleans.

(Invited) ‘Time, Melancholy, and the Anxiety of the Idle Body’, Leiden University, 7 April 2016.

(Invited) Sonnet-writing workshop (in Dutch) and performance of selected sonnets at Shakespeares Sonnettenfestival, Felix in de Steigers, Amsterdam, 23 April 2016.

Moderator and co-organizer: 400 Years of Shakespeare, Amsterdamse Academische Club, 21 April 2016.

(Invited) ‘Introduction: Romeo and Juliet’ and interview with Sasha Waltz at the premier of Romeo et Juliette, National Opera and Ballet, Amsterdam, 15 April 2016.

(Invited) “Refusing Melancholy: Occasio as Mediator of Emotion oin Shakespeare's Drama”, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, April 2015, Geneva, NY.

'“Our brains beguiled”: Ecclesiastes and Temporal Discontinuity in Sonnet 59', in the 'Shakespeare's Sonnets Now' seminar at SAA 2015, March 2015, Vancouver, Canada.
 

“Refusing Melancholy: Occasio as Mediator of Emotion on the Early Modern Stage”, “Seizing the Moment: Rethinking Occasio in Early Modern Literature and Culture” panel (organized by me) at the Renaissance Society of America conference, March 2015, Berlin.
 

"Shakespeare's 'Rude, Distract'd Plan': Early Eighteenth-Century Adaptations and the making of a 'Shakespeare' fit for Europe", Shakespeare in the Making of Europe workshop, Munich 13-15 June 2014. 

“A Sovereignty in Time: Nostalgia, Occasio, and Shakespeare’s Richard II”, Time and Space in Early Modern Europe conference, Queen’s University, Belfast, January 20-21 2014.

“The Past Just Isn’t What It Used to Be: Interrogating Nostalgia in Early Modern England and Shakespeare’s Richard II”, part of the “Understanding Nostalgia in Sixteenth-Century England” panel (organized by me) at the Renaissance Society of America conference, March 27–29 2014, New York, NY.

“Worse than Senseless Things”: Class and Emotion in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,  “Class and Emotion” seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America conference, Toronto, March 28-20, 2013.

(Invited) “Interrogating Temporality in Renaissance Drama”, Golden Age Colloquium at  the Amsterdam Center for the Study of the Golden Age, Amsterdam, March 7, 2013.

(Invited) “The Feeling of Revolution: The Idea of Cyclical History in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar”, Faculty Lecture Series, Department of English, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, November 22 2012.  

(Invited) “Music in Shakespeare / Shakespeare in the Music,” Friends of the Rotterdam Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, November 2, 2012. 

“The Past Just Isn’t What It Used to Be: Shakespeare and the Rhetoric of Nostalgia,” “Emotion in Shakespeare” seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America conference, Boston, MA April 5–7 2012.

“‘La calamité de ce temps”: Politicizing, Marketing, and Dramatizing Nostalgia in England and France,”  Renaissance Society of America conference, Washington, D.C., March 22–24 2012.  

(Invited) “‘La calamité de ce temps”: Politicizing, Marketing, and Dramatizing Nostalgia in England and France,” Launch Conference of the Centre for Early Modern Exchanges–University College London, London, September 15–17 2011.

“‘Immortal Shakespear on this Tale began, / And wrote it in a rude, Historick Plan’: Using and Abusing Shakespeare in Early 18th Century Adaptations of the History Plays,” Shakespeare: Sources and Adaptation conference, Cambridge University, September 9–11 2011.

(Invited) “Marlowe, Greene, Nashe and the Uses of Nostalgia,” “University Wits as Agents of Change” symposium, University of Agder, Norway, July 29– August 1,  2010.

“In the Mean Season: Richard II and the Nostalgic Politics of Hospitality,” 4th National Conference of the Society for Renaissance Studies, York, July 16–18 2010.

“A Rhetoric of Nostalgia in the Public Sphere: the Discourse of Lost Hospitality in Richard II”, “The Publics of the Public Stage” seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America conference, Chicago, IL, April 1–3 2010.