Peter A. Munch

Peter Andreas Munch (December 19, 1908 – January 10, 1984) was a Norwegian-born sociologist, educator, and author. In 1948, he immigrated to the United States as a post-doctoral research fellow studying Norwegian-American rural sociology in the Midwest. He ended his professional career at Southern Illinois University, with a focus on graduate studies and sociological research based on trips to the remote South Atlantic island Tristan da Cunha.

Peter Andreas Munch was born December 19, 1908, at Nes in Hedmark, Norway.

He studied theology at the University of Oslo receiving a Candidatus theologiæ degree in 1932. He then completed linguistic studies at the University of Oxford in order to read ancient religious texts, continuing in 1935 with a period at the University of Wittenberg in Halle, Germany, studying social history in the Ancient Near East. This resulted in numerous publications written in Norwegian, English, and German regarding original Hebrew Old Testament texts and their meaning in the modern world.

During 1937 and 1938, he was a member of the Norwegian Scientific Expedition to Tristan da Cunha, where he studied social interaction among the isolated population as a humanist and social scholar. This work was the subject of his doctoral dissertation, finished in 1943 but hidden when he was imprisoned by the German occupation forces at Grini detention camp. In 1946, when the University in Oslo was reopened after World War II, he successfully defended the dissertation titled Sociology of Tristan da Cunha based on the Gemeinschaft concepts introduced by Ferdinand Tönnies, and obtained the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

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