Sandra Ballif Straubhaar

Straubhaar's 2011 book Old Norse Women's Poetry: The Voices of Female Skalds presents the work of Icelandic and Norwegian women poets from the 9th to 13th centuries, in other words starting from the Viking age. Each text is presented in three forms, with the Old Norse poetry, a verse translation, and a somewhat literal prose translation. The skalds covered range from "real people" and the quasi-historical, to dream-verse, legendary heroines, magic-workers and prophetesses, and finally the hostile "trollwomen". The book had a mixed reception among scholars, who noted its problematic definitions of women grading from real to magical.

Straubhaar has written numerous research articles, encyclopedia entries including eight to the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, and book chapters including "Myth, late Roman history, and multiculturalism in Tolkien's Middle-Earth" in Jane Chance's 2004 reader Tolkien and the Invention of Myth. Straubhaar has published the following books:

She held positions as lecturer and assistant professor at Lansing Community College, the University of São Paulo, Michigan State University, and Brigham Young University before moving to the University of Texas at Austin in 1998; she became a distinguished senior lecturer there in 2013.

Straubhaar is well known from her articles on Old Norse women's poetry as well as her popular entry on that subject in the 1993 Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia.

Sandra Straubhaar obtained her bachelor's degree in German and English at Brigham Young University in 1972. She gained an MA in German at Stanford University in 1975, and then studied Old Norse and modern Icelandic at the University of Iceland until 1978. She obtained her PhD in German Studies and Humanities at Stanford University in 1982.