Susan C. Karant-Nunn

Susan Catherine Karant-Nunn is an American historian. A 2003 Guggenheim Fellow, she has written on the Reformation, including books like Luther's Pastors, Zwickau in Transition, 1500–1547 (1987), The Reformation of Ritual (1997), The Reformation of Feeling (2010), and The Personal Luther (2017). She was president of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference in 1992 and became director of the University of Arizona's Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies in 2001.

Biography Susan Catherine Karant-Nunn

In 1970, she started working at Portland State University (PSU) as an assistant professor of history, and she was promoted to associate professor in 1975 and professor in 1983. In 2009, she was appointed Regents' Professor. In 1987, she authored another book, Zwickau in Transition, 1500–1547. She was a 1993–1994 Fulbright Scholar at the University of Tübingen; her project, named The Modification of Ecclesiastical Ritual in 16th-Century Germany, funded her research for her 1997 book The Reformation of Ritual. In 2003, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for "a study of the molding of religious fervor in the German reformations"; this allowed her to finish the research for her 2010 book The Reformation of Feeling. She has also served as president of the Society for Reformation Research, and she won their 2016 Bodo Nischan Award. She later wrote the books The Personal Luther (2017) and Ritual, Gender, and Emotions (2022). In 2020, Brill released the 223rd volume of its Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions series, Cultural Shifts and Ritual Transformations in Reformation Europe, as a festschrift in her honor.

Karant-Nunn also served as the editor or a co-editor for several volumes, specifically Germania Illustrata (1992), Luther on Women: A Sourcebook (2003), The Work of Heiko A. Oberman (2003), Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (2003), Masculinity in the Reformation Era (2008), and Reformation Research in Europe and North America (2010). She later married historian Frederick M. Nunn.