Dr Dennis Klass

Dennis Klass is Professor emeritus, Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He earned his doctorate in the Psychology of Religion at the University of Chicago.

He has been active in the study of death, dying, and bereavement since 1968 when he was an assistant in the famous Death and Dying Seminar led by Elisabeth Kubler Ross at the University of Chicago Hospitals.

A licensed psychologist, Klass is retired from a clinical practice with difficult and complex bereavements. He is on the editorial boards of Death Studies and Omega, Journal of Death and Dying, and a member of the International Work Group in Death, Dying, and Bereavement.

Beginning in 1979, Klass focused his attention on parental bereavement in a long-term ethnographic study of a local chapter of a selfhelp group of bereaved parents. He was the professional advisor to the St. Louis Chapter of Bereaved Parents. The Compassionate Friends National Board honored him in 1992 with their Appreciation Award. Later and into his retirement Klass turned his research toward the crosscultural study of grief, especially on how bonds with the dead fit into cultural narratives.

Klass is the co-editor, with Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman, of Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (Taylor Francis, 1996) and the co-author with Bob Goss of Dead but not Lost: Grief Narratives in Religious Traditions (AltaMira, 2005).

He is the author of Parental Grief: Resolution and Solace (Springer, 1988) and The Spiritual Lives of Bereaved Parents (Brunner/Mazel, 1999). He has written over 70 articles or book chapters on death and grief and on the psychology of religion.