Owen Cramer was a faculty child at the University of Chicago, an Oberlin College undergraduate and a University of Texas Ph.D. student in the early 1960s when a literary classical humanism flourished there under William Arrowsmith, John Sullivan and others. Owen joined the CC faculty in 1965, re-starting a program that had been without full-time faculty since the early 1950s.
In college he studied French and German as well as Latin and Greek, and he had spent a formative senior high school year in the Athens suburbs, picking up some Modern Greek. His dissertation was on Odysseus in the Iliad and he has published articles and reviews in Homeric studies, but his teaching and curriculum development have led him into a variety of interests in European and American literature and history.
He was a co-founder of the program in Comparative Literature where he co-taught the introductory course for many years, as well as occasional Practice in Comparison and Junior/Senior Seminar courses; at various times he has worked in the Romance Languages and Spanish Departments.
He sings tenor in the CC Choir, was married to a college classmate, and is proud of his four sons, and eight variously-gendered grandchildren.
