Scholar's library may go to UA

by Stephanie Innes
Arizona Daily Star, October 3, 2002, 1B

  The University of Arizona may acquire a rare library of books belonging to the late professor Heiko A. Oberman, who was a world-renowned expert on Protestant history.
   Officials with the UA also are seeking to create a permanent professor position in Oberman's name. They will launch a fund-raising campaign to endow the position on Oct. 13.
   "The reputation of this man really warrants it. He was such a luminous figure," said Susan C. Karant-Nunn, director of the UA's Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies.
   Oberman was considered an expert on Martin Luther, a German priest and biblical scholar whose writings in 1517 on ecclesiastical abuses are credited with triggering the Protestant Reformation.
   Karant-Nunn stressed, however, that Oberman's expertise extended well beyond Martin Luther and the Reformation, citing as an example a book he wrote about the origins of anti-Semitism in Europe.
   UA officials are hoping to raise $2 million to endow a professor position in Oberman's name. They have already raised $400,000. The Oberman family has agreed to transfer Oberman's library of more than 10,000 books and volumes upon the establishment of the professor position, which would bring another renowned medieval and Reformation scholar to the university, Karant-Nunn said.
   The Oberman Library has been characterized as the largest such collection remaining in private hands in North America. It was appraised at $1.2 million in 1998. The collection is focused on the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation.
   "This will make the UA Library a center of excellence in the field of early modern European thought," said a press release from the UA division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies.
   The Oberman Library would be housed at the UA's Main Library in its Special Collections Wing and is expected to draw scholars from across the country. The collection includes a number of rare printed books from the early 16th century.
   Oberman, an author and editor of 36 books, joined the UA faculty in 1984 and served as director and founder of its Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies, which offers graduate programs. He died of melanoma in April 2001 at the age of 70.
   During his lifetime, he worked as a professor at Harvard University and in Germany before moving his family to Tucson because of his wife's ill health. In 1996 he was awarded the prestigious A. H. Heineken prize for history from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
   The committee praised him as a "true pioneer in the field of historical science, particularly due to the new light he has shed on the study of the history of the Middle Age and the Modern Age."
   The fund-raising campaign for the Heiko A. Oberman Chair in Late Medieval and Reformation History will kick off with a reception at 1 p.m. Oct. 13 in the Special Collections Wing of the UA's Main Library, 1510 E. University Blvd, Ed Donnerstein, dean of the UA College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Carla Stoffle, dean of libraries, will be the guest speakers.

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