Kramer champions public humanities and engaged teaching
The Massey Award winner advocates for intellectual curiosity, the importance of faculty and the University’s role in strengthening civic life.
“Lloyd Kramer was put on Earth to be a transformational leader who brings the best out of people, working with everyone in a collaborative way.” That’s the reason the professor emeritus of history is a 2026 Massey Award winner, according to a former student who became Kramer’s colleague.
Before he retired in 2024, Kramer taught and mentored students, published nine books, twice chaired the history department, directed Carolina Public Humanities in revitalizing its outreach work and served as interim chair of the faculty.
Throughout his time at Carolina, Kramer engaged with five intersecting communities: students, from whom he gained new perspectives; faculty, whose talent and commitment he deeply respects; administrators, with whom he built relationships through listening and dialogue; alumni, whose support and curiosity shaped conversations about Carolina’s future; and the public, including teachers and humanities program participants.
“Professor Kramer has dedicated the better part of his career to serving the Carolina community,” a nominator wrote. “He advocated for the importance of teaching and scholarship while also creating a collegial and collaborative climate for faculty and students alike.”
Kramer earned awards for inspiring students: the Johnston Teaching Excellence Award and the student-selected Undergraduate Teaching Award. In 2021, he received the Thomas Jefferson Award, the faculty’s highest honor, and gave a talk that emphasized Jefferson’s ideals rather than his contradictions and flaws.
As director of Carolina Public Humanities from 2014 to 2024, Kramer expanded the faculty’s humanities-centered engagement with teachers and communities across North Carolina.
“Lloyd saw the work of Carolina Public Humanities as a necessary service for the state that the University should provide to fulfill its mission of being of the people and for the people. Too often, humanities scholarship is ivory tower-ish. The public humanities say, ‘No, we have something of value that is needed in the community,’” a colleague said.
Kramer grew up in Evansville, Indiana. He graduated from Maryville College in Tennessee, where he became interested in the French and American revolutions and how people responded to political conflicts and revolutionary upheavals.
After earning a master’s degree in history from Boston College, he wanted to experience life abroad. He took a job teaching European history at a postsecondary school in Hong Kong. In summer 1975, he spent nearly three months traveling from Hong Kong to Paris and then studied French by immersing himself in Parisian history and culture.
The time abroad fed his interest in modern European history, cross-cultural exchanges and 19th-century France. He attended Cornell for a doctorate in European history, writing a doctoral dissertation on exiles in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s. He continues to examine how travel alters one’s sense of self, most recently in his book “Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys Toward French and American Selfhood.”
In 1986, he joined Carolina’s faculty. “I wanted to help young people understand how their lives are part of history because history is about a long pattern of events, conflicts and changing economic, social, political conditions that shape who people are,” he said.
In Kramer’s class on American writers who traveled to Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, students read novels and letters to explore how the authors’ experiences helped them understand themselves. They also studied paintings and photographs. Kramer found it especially rewarding when students connected lessons to their lives: “Students would later write me and say, ‘Wow! I was in a cafe in France, and I remembered how Hemingway said he wrote an essay or a book sitting in a café,’ or ‘I saw a Cézanne painting and remembered our discussion about the importance of Americans encountering modern art.’
“That’s why I’m a great believer in the liberal arts,” Kramer said.
