Professional Bio:
Holly Johnson teaches courses in Old and Middle English literature. She specializes in late-medieval literature, with an interest in sermons, the art of memory, and the medieval imagination. Her book, titled A Grammar of Good Friday: Macaronic Sermons of Late Medieval England (2010), offers a detailed study of Good Friday preaching and an edition (with modern translation) of five highly imaginative, rhetorically sophisticated macaronic (mixed Latin and Middle English) Good Friday sermons preached in late-medieval England (c.1350-1450). She has also published on the art of preaching on Good Friday and the use of the seven deadly sins in sermons on the Passion.
Education:
Ph.D. 2001 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.A. 1989 The University of Maryland
B.A. 1987 The University of Maryland
Teaching Interests:
Old and Middle English Literature
Recent Courses:
- Late Medieval Literature and Culture: The Fifteenth Century
- The Legends of King Arthur
- Chaucer
- Chaucer and the Language of Love (graduate)
- The Medieval Religious Imagination (graduate)
- Medieval Theatre (graduate)
Publications:
Book
The Grammar of Good Friday: Macaronic Sermons of Late Medieval England.
Sermo 8. Turnhout: Brepols,
Forthcoming, 2012.
Articles
“A Fifteenth-Century Sermon Enacts the Seven Deadly Sins.” Sin and its Cultural Place in the West: Medieval and Early Modern. Ed. Richard G. Newhauser and Susan J. Ridyard. York Medieval Press, forthcoming.
“God’s Music-Making: The Cross-Harp Metaphor in Late-Medieval Preaching.” Medieval Perspectives 22 (2007 [2011]): 48-59.
“The Hard Bed of the Cross: Good Friday Preaching and the Seven Deadly Sins.” The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to Individuals. Ed. Richard Newhauser. Leiden: Brill, 2007. 129-44.
“Fashioning Devotion: The Art of Good Friday Preaching in Chaucerian England.” Speculum Sermonis: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Medieval Sermon. Ed. Georgiana Donavin, et al. Disputatio 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. 315-34.
Professional Honors and Awards
- College of Arts and Sciences Humanities Teaching Award, 2010.
- Selected for the NEH Summer Seminar “The Seven Deadly Sins as Cultural Constructions in the Middle Ages,” directed by Richard Newhauser in Cambridge, England, 2004.
- The Tanner Teaching Assistants Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, UNC-CH, 2000–2001.
- The Joseph Breen Fellowship for outstanding work in Medieval Studies, 2000–2001.
- The Students’ Undergraduate Teaching Award, UNC–CH, 1998.
- The James Gaskin Award for excellence in teaching composition awarded by the UNC–CH English Department, 1998.
