William Kurrelmeyer Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts

WILLIAM KURRELMEYER, A&S 1896, 1899 (PhD), who joined the Hopkins faculty in 1900 and remained for more than 40 years, molded the German program, and made Hopkins an international center for German scholarship. Dr. Kurrelmeyer’s fields of study included the history of aesthetics, lyric poetry, narrative theory, and the periods of Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Much of his scholarship concentrated on the works of Goethe, Kleist, and Nietzsche. A discriminating book collector, he acquired nearly 25,000 volumes, which he eventually donated to the Eisenhower Library.

His daughter, CARRIE MAY KURRELMEYER ZINTL, A&S 1929 (PhD), was a scholar of classics and languages. A professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins, she was professor emeritus of German at Loyola College at the time of her death in 1992. In addition to creating the Kurrelmeyer Chair, her estate endowed a fund in her name in the Department of History to support library acquisitions, fellowships, and the William Kurrelmeyer Curatorship of Special Collections in the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, since renamed the William Kurrelmeyer Curatorship of Rare Books and Manuscripts.

Professor William Kurrelmeyer Chair in the Department of German

WILLIAM KURRELMEYER, A&S 1896, 1899 (Ph.D.), who joined the Hopkins faculty in 1900 and remained for more than 40 years, molded the German program, and made Hopkins an international center for German scholarship. Dr. Kurrelmeyer’s fields of study included the history of aesthetics, lyric poetry, narrative theory, and the periods of Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Much of his scholarship concentrated on the works of Goethe, Kleist, and Nietzsche. A discriminating book collector, he acquired nearly 25,000 volumes, which he eventually donated to the Eisenhower Library.