While volunteering in the Middle East last year with Christian Peacemaker Teams, Kathleen Namphy came upon a weeping Palestinian woman at a checkpoint. The guard would not let her pass to take her child to the hospital. Namphy picked up the child. The soldier blocking the path asked if the child was part of her family. “Yes,” Namphy told him, “the human family.” She told the guard that to stop her, he would have to shoot her.
Namphy, a lecturer emerita in English, died August 22 after falling while climbing on Iran’s tallest mountain, 18,600-foot Mount Damavand. She was 69.
The daughter of a forest ranger and timber salesman father and a schoolteacher mother, Kathleen Kampmann was born in Park Falls, Wis., the middle of three sisters. The family moved many times to ranger stations in California, Oregon and Washington; and her parents supplemented her formal schooling with lessons in botany, geology and zoology. After her 1956 graduation from the University of Washington, her life became a crazy quilt of adventure.
In her early 20s, she traveled to the Amazon and wrote a descriptive grammar of a tribal language. She studied Elizabethan drama at Oxford University in 1956 on a Fulbright scholarship. In 1957, she won a gold medal in the high jump in the East-West Games in Moscow. Setting out to retrace the steps of Alexander the Great and Marco Polo, she drove and hiked from Germany to the Middle East and into Asia before hitching a ride across the Pacific in the laundry room of a cruise ship. She trapped animals, including a pair of rare onagers, in Iran for American zoos—an activity that she later would view as at odds with her environmentalism.
In the 1960s, she taught at the American University of Beirut and Beirut College for Women. During this time, she met and married Haitian entrepreneur Joseph Namphy, with whom she had four children. They later divorced.
Kathleen Namphy received a master’s degree in English in 1970 from the University of Portland and her doctorate in English and humanities in 1978 from Stanford. She taught the range of Western literature, but her specialty was T.S. Eliot. She won Stanford’s two top teaching honors: the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award in 1982 and the Walter J. Gores Award in 1993. “She was a splendid teacher,” says Ronald Rebholz, professor emeritus of English. “She expected her students to express themselves with clarity and grace.”
Even after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in 1980 and breast cancer in 1990, Namphy retained her spirit. “She was always troubling the powerful on behalf of the oppressed,” says the Rev. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, a former dean of Memorial Church who told the story about the Palestinian checkpoint at a September 21 service honoring Namphy. In working with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq, she lobbied U.S. military authorities on behalf of Iraqi women whose male relatives were missing and perhaps in custody. She had learned about abuses at Abu Ghraib months before the matter became widely known.
Namphy’s survivors include her children, Lisa-Marie, Andre, Paul and Mychel; two grandchildren; and her sisters, Pat Spada and Kay Frawley. She fostered several children and young adults who became part of her extended family.
