Heiko A. Oberman

Susan C. Karant-Nunn became director of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies in 2001 upon the death of Regents' Professor Heiko A. Oberman, the founder of the Division. Until 1999 she had been a professor of history at Portland State University. At the University of Arizona not only has she written books and articles, taught and supervised undergraduate and graduate students, but also, with the help of Luise Betterton and Sandra Kimball, raised nearly $1.7 million toward the endowment of the Heiko A. Oberman Chair in Late Medieval and Reformation History. Since 2001, seven Ph.D. students have successfully defended their theses under her direction. She currently supervises eleven M.A. and Ph.D. students, who were attracted by her reputation as a Reformation scholar.

Susan Karant-Nunn's work has been most influential in Reformation History. Her first two books, Luther's Pastors: The Reformation in the Ernestine Countryside (1979) and Zwickau in Transition, 1500-1547: The Reformation as an Agent of Change (1987) were focused on Saxony, the heartland of the Reformation. These two books are exemplary works of social history. Karant-Nunn has gone on to write two works of cultural history that examine the German Reformation from innovative viewpoints: The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany, which was published in 1997 and won the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize in History and Theology; and her soon-to-appear latest work, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany, which will be published by Oxford University Press. We already look forward to the fruits of her new project on Martin Luther's body.

Susan Karant-Nunn has edited and co-edited five volumes, the most recent in 2008, Masculinity in the Reformation Era (together with Scott H. Hendrix). She has published innumerable articles and book chapters, ranging from the emergence of the pastoral family in Reformation Germany to ghost stories and their rejection in the later sixteenth century, covering a fascinating breadth of topics in social and cultural history. Her invited guest lectureships and professorships have taken her to many universities in twelve countries. Since 1998 she had been, together with Anne Jacobson Schutte, the North American managing editor of the Archive for Reformation History, the leading journal in Reformation history. This editorship reflects her standing in the field of Reformation history. Among her numerous honors, she held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2003-2004; and most recently, in October 2008, she was named one of the three first Earl H. Carroll Fellows of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona, its highest award for scholarly distinction.

In Susan Karant-Nunn, the University of Arizona has gained a Regents' Professor with an outstanding international reputation. Her books have deeply influenced the field of Reformation history—so much so that a leading French early modernist, Professor Bernard Roussel of the Sorbonne, in 1997 entitled a plenary lecture: "A la manière de Susan Karant-Nunn: réflexions sur la réforme du rituel dans l'espace francophone" ["In the manner of Susan Karant-Nunn: Reflections on the Reformation of Ritual in the Francophone lands"].