Kurt Heinrich Wolff (1912-2003) was a German-born American sociologist who studied the sociology of knowledge. In 1935, Wolff earned his Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Florence, Italy. He moved to the United States in 1939, to escape anti-Semitic laws in Europe. Starting that year, Wolff conducted field research at Southern Methodist University in Texas and the University of Chicago in Illinois, then taught at Earlham College in Indiana. During the 1940s, Wolff created a new qualitative methodology for the study of human society called "surrender-and-catch," where the researcher "surrenders" to the research topic by immersing themselves into the research environment, while fully engaging with the topic outside of their learned experiences and understanding, hoping to subsequently "catch" unanticipated observations and reflections. Wolff became a United States citizen in 1945, and began teaching as an assistant, and later associate, professor at the Ohio State University. During this time, he started translating works by Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, and Karl Mannheim into English from German and French. In 1959, Wolff began teaching at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, and served as Chair of the Sociology Department there until his retirement in 1982. After that, Wolff remained active as emeritus faculty at Brandeis and continued teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in sociology until 1992. He died in Newton, Massachusetts, at the age of 91.