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.
Held by Gabrielle Dean
GABRIELLE DEAN, PhD, is the William Kurrelmeyer Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts at the Sheridan Libraries, the Librarian for the Writing Seminars, and Lecturer for the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the associate editor of Archive Journal and an editorial board member of the Dickinson Electronic Archives. Her research focuses on the exchanges between textual and visual culture during the industrial era of print, and on the history of the archival imagination. She has published in the journals Digital Humanities Quarterly, Modernism/modernity, The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Textual Cultures, among others, and in the collections Primary Stein, edited by Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch, Emily Dickinson in Context, edited by Eliza Richards, and Past or Portal?: Teaching Undergraduates Using Special Collections and Archives, edited by Eleanor Mitchell, Peggy Seiden, and Suzy Taraba. In her classes, which focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and textual materiality, students often contribute to a blog or digital exhibition, learning how to read and enrich the information infrastructure of the texts they engage. She has curated exhibitions about H. L. Mencken, Stephen Crane, John Barth, and most recently, Edgar Allan Poe.
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.