In Memoriam
James Matthew Kittelson
Professor James Matthew Kittelson, Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University, died November 10, 2003, at the age of 62. Professor Kittelson graduated from Saint Olaf College in 1963. In 1969 he received the Ph.D. in History from Stanford University. After four years on the faculty of the Department of History at the University of Iowa, he joined the Department of History at The Ohio State University, where he taught for twenty-six years. After he became Professor Emeritus in 1997, he was appointed Professor of Church History at Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota, as well as Director of the Thrivent Reformation Research Program, which specializes in gathering and making available to scholars sixteenth-century printed materials on Luther and the Lutheran Reformation. Professor Kittelson was a devoted scholar who concentrated on Martin Luther and the Lutheran Reformation, especially as it unfolded in Strasbourg, whose archives he knew extraordinarily well. He was a demanding but supportive director of graduate students. While he taught at The Ohio State University, he directed six students to the Ph.D. He published three books, most recently Toward an Established Church: Strasbourg from 1500 to the Dawn of the Seventeenth Century (2000). The book that reached the widest audience was Luther the Reformer (1986), which is both scholarly and readable. It has been translated into Chinese, Estonian, Finnish, Korean, and Portuguese. During his career Professor Kittelson was recognized by prestigious fellowships including a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society.
For three decades he was a leader in the field of Reformation studies, to which he gave generously of his time and talent, serving on the editorial boards of Studies in the Reformation and the Lutheran Quarterly. He also was a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Reformation Research (Saint Louis) and of the Executive Committees of the Newbury Library Renaissance Center (Chicago) and the Society for Reformation Research.
Jim is survived by his wife of forty years, Margaret, who was his friend, adviser, and occasional critic, as well as two daughters, two sons-in-law, and two grandchildren.