Theodore D. Kemper

in Brooklyn, NY, 1926, and lived and went to school in New York City. He attended Townsend

Harris High School and the City College of New York, receiving his degree in English in 1949.

He worked for several years as a writer at a photo agency and at Metropolitan Sunday

Newspapers before returning to school to obtain his MA (1960) and PhD (1963) in Sociology at

NYU.

His first academic job was at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1963 - 1966). He said often

that it was his formative academic experience and that it taught him the second of the two

rules for a successful university career: Hard work. (The first rule was: Get along with your

colleagues and the chair). He then moved to Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. While

there he began to develop the ideas that led to his first book, A Social Interactional Theory of

Emotions (1978). This work laid out a new theory of emotions, based on the idea that most

human emotions result from outcomes in the fundamental relational dimensions of power and

status. This work encompassed all the major emotions, including love.

In 1968, he moved to the University of Toronto and in 1970 to Queens College, CUNY. From

1973 to retirement in 1994 he taught at St. John’s University, New York. While there he

published Social Structure and Testosterone: Explorations of the Socio-Bio-Social Chain

(1990). In this book he derived several major theoretical consequences of a body of empirical

work that showed that after victory or status-elevation testosterone rises in males, while defeat

or status-demotion led to testosterone decline. He also published an edited volume, Research

Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions (1990).

After retirement, he continued to publish articles and chapters in the field, but by 2007 was

devoting himself exclusively to a third career, namely playwriting. He joked that his ambition

was to become “a minor playwright.” A number of his plays received staged-readings or full

performances. He maintained that it was harder to get a play accepted than to get an article

published in a major sociological journal. He had experience of both.

He was a devoted father, brother, uncle and partner. He is lovingly survived by a daughter,

Nadja Streiter, three grandchildren, William, Amanda and Jason Streiter, a sister, Roslyn

Schwartz, a partner Muriel Reid, and niece and nephew Susan Maya and Steven Schwartz and

their children, Daniel, Daria and Jonathan.

A funeral service for Theodore will be held from 1:30 PM to 2:15 PM at Sinai Chapels, 114-03 Queens Blvd, Forest Hills, NY 11375

Following the funeral service will be a committal service from 2:15 PM to 2:45 PM at Beth David Cemetery, 300 Elmont Road, Elmont, NY 11003.