In 1992, Klassen earned The Graduate Gold Medal for Master of Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University for her thesis "Going by the Moon and the Stars: Stories of Two Russian Mennonite Women.

[3] Under supervision of Karen McCarthy Brown, Klassen completed her PhD thesis on religion and home birth in 1997.

Her next book, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity, won the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in 2012.

[5] Three years later, she received the Anneliese Maier Research Award, which included a €250,000 grant to study the role of religion and memory.

[3] In 2018, she published The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land through The University of Chicago Press.