James Hampton Kirkland (September 9, 1859 – August 5, 1939) was an American Latinist and university administrator.

[2] Kirkland enrolled at Leipzig University, where he studied "Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Anglo-Saxon".

[2] His PhD thesis was published in 1886 as a pamphlet entitled A Study of the Anglo-Saxon Poem, the Harrowing of Hell (Grein's Hollenfahrt Christi).

[4] Meanwhile, Kirkland spent a semester at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, followed by a few months in Geneva, Switzerland, where he started learning French.

[2] According to Professor Edwin Mims, who served as the Chair of the English Department from 1912 to 1942, he was chosen for "his temperament, his training, and his personality.

[1] By the mid-1920s, he moved the Vanderbilt University Medical School to a new building on campus, thanks to donations from the Rockefeller Foundation and the General Education Board.

[1] Kirkland published God and the New Knowledge with his colleague Edwin Mim and Oswald Eugene Brown in 1926.

Kirkland summered near Ahmic Lake in Canada with his family and his friend, Abraham Flexner, from the 1910s.