KALMAN A. BURNIM was a professor of drama and oratory at Tufts University, Massachusetts, and later the department’s chairman and director of graduate studies. A quiet, modest and generous man, he enabled his students to pursue research interests abroad by founding in 1967 the Tufts in London Programme — one of the earliest American junior-year-abroad schemes.
His own passionate interest in British theatre history took him to London in 1993, when he was introduced to the Garrick Club through the theatre historian Iain Mackintosh. He was invited to edit a catalogue of the club’s pictures, which had been commissioned by the chairman of the works of art sub-committee, Sir Anthony Lousada, but needed overhauling after the death of its author, Dr Geoffrey Ashton. With some assistance from Andrew Wilton of the Tate, Burnim completed it four years later. It was published to great acclaim, and at its launch Burnim was presented to the Queen. “You have come a long way, Dr Burnim,” she said. He wondered later whether she had been speaking literally or figuratively.
Kalman Aaron Burnim was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1928 and grew up in a poor family in the tight-knit Jewish community of Revere. After serving with the US forces under General MacArthur in Japan at the end of the Second World War, during which time he witnessed the devastation at Hiroshima, he returned to Boston and was admitted to Tufts.
There he met his mentor, Marston Balch. Anxious to make up for lost time, and displaying prodigious energy and talent for scholarship, Burnim completed his drama degree in two and a half years. He gained a masters in theatre from the University of Indiana the following year, and after a short break working with his father he earned his doctorate from Yale in 1958 with a thesis on the life of David Garrick, subsequently published as a book.
Teaching posts at Valparaiso University, Indiana, and Pittsburgh followed, after which, in 1960, he returned to Tufts again as Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory. He became director of the Arena Theatre and succeeded Balch as chair of the department and artistic director of the theatre.
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The first students on the Tufts in London Programme spent three months immersed in performance, text, stagecraft and management; and experienced the swinging England of the late 1960s. Actively encouraged to attend as many plays as possible, they were also taught by a combination of Tufts faculty members and specialists co-opted from British universities, the National Theatre, the V&A and the London drama schools.
Such was the scheme’s success that Tufts was encouraged to extend it to other disciplines and by the early 1980s it included social science as well as arts and humanities. Faced with increasing interest, Tufts sought to integrate itself with a British university and in 1982 the programme was relaunched at Westfield College, then part of the University of London. In 1988 it found a permanent home at University College London.
Burnim spent two years as a research professor at George Washington University in Washington, and also became president of the American Society for Theatre Research. He retired from Tufts in 1987 but continued with his own research. After the first Garrick Club catalogue came, in 2003, another on the notable collection of theatrical figurines presented to the club by one of its members, the actor Richard Bebb (obituary, April 20, 2006).
That was followed by an account of the sitters and artists in the Garrick Club collection, which he wrote with John Baskett, Lousada’s successor, and named Brief Lives (2003) after John Aubrey’s book. It drew partly on the 16-volume Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800 that Burnim had published in the US with Philip H. Highfill and Edward A. Langans.
Burnim was made a special honorary life member of the Garrick, and was later presented with the Garrick Medal at a dinner in his honour. He made frequent visits from Massachusetts, and Springhill, Florida, his winter home, to update his work.
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A man of compassion and sensitivity, Burnim engaged with the political challenges of his time: he promoted racial integration and was an early dissenter during the Vietnam War. He loved travel and the dog track, and was a great family man. He had sayings taped up by his desk at home, among them “Example is always more effective than precept.”
He is survived by Verna, his wife of 55 years, and by two daughters and a son.
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Kalman A. Burnim, theatre historian, was born on March 7, 1928. He died after a stroke on July 30, 2006, aged 78.