October 29, 2024 | By Kirstin Fawcett (AGI26)

“How do you tell a great book?” a Brooklyn College professor asked a room full of students reading the Iliad in the late 1940s. “Your hair stands on end and the back of your neck tingles.” Among these students was a young Eva Brann—and the instructor’s words, uttered with a “quiet undramatic intensity,” changed Brann’s life.

“I fell in love with Homer, with my teacher, with those classics all at once,” she later recalled. This discussion indirectly paved the way for Brann’s arrival at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where, as a beloved tutor, dean, colleague, and friend, she spent a lifetime celebrating the power of transformative texts—and teaching generations of Johnnies to love them as much as she did.

Brann, the longest-serving tutor in St. John’s history and a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, died on Monday, October 28, at age 95. She remained a fixture at the college for more than 60 years, joining the rank of honorary alumna in 1989 before serving as college dean for seven years in the 1990s. In 2022, Brann was named tutor emerita; she remained an educator until the end, presiding over lively conversations with guests and spearheading new projects as recently as last summer.

“One of the great joys of my time at St. John’s is having gotten to know Eva,” says Collegewide President Nora Demleitner. “The mischievous twinkle in her eye, which she retained till the end, her intellect—never used to abuse or demean, and her legendary humor made her a unique gem on campus and around the world. She cemented St. John’s as an intellectual giant among liberal arts colleges, and in American higher education. And she never stopped advocating for the value of our unique education as she helped others, around the globe, to emulate our discussion-based and question-driven Great Books education.”

Raised in Germany, educated in Brooklyn, and trained as an archaeologist in New Haven and Athens, Eva T. H. Brann was a citizen of the world before finding a lifelong home in Annapolis. She was born in Berlin in 1929 to German Jewish parents. Her father, a successful physician, enjoyed studying philosophy in his free time and explained the nuances of Kant to Brann during long walks. 

Amid a happy childhood, the specter of Hitler loomed large; Brann remembered how “the Nazi kids would throw rocks” as she walked to her private Jewish school. In 1941, alongside her mother and younger brother, the 12-year-old Brann boarded a train to Lisbon, where they set sail to New York City to join her father, who had emigrated to America the year prior.

Once the family reunited in Brooklyn, Brann struggled in school as a non-native English speaker and vaguely dreamed of becoming a scientist. Then, as a junior at Brooklyn College, Brann encountered the Iliad—and, by extension, her future.

Brann went from flunking her first classics course exam to having her professor volunteer to teach her Greek. The offer never materialized, as the elderly instructor passed away the following year, but Brann’s newfound devotion compelled her to pursue a Master of Arts in classics and a PhD in archaeology from Yale University. While at Yale, the promising young scholar traveled to Greece as a Sibley Fellow of Phi Beta Kappa to participate in the excavation of the Athenian Agora, which was run by a prominent overseas research institute, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Brann, who specialized in ancient Greek pottery, was beginning to realize that she preferred the life of the mind to that of an archaeologist. Luckily, a colleague in Athens, the classicist and philosopher Seth Benardete, knew of the perfect job for her: his own position at St. John’s College, where according to his own account, he had just been fired. Speaking to St. John’s President Richard Weigle, Benardete “told them I had just the person for them—Eva Brann,” he remembered. “I made them write down the name.”

Brann officially received her PhD in 1956 and spent a year at Stanford University as an archaeology instructor before paying a fateful first visit to St. John’s in Annapolis for an official job interview. As soon as she stepped foot on campus in 1957, she said, she “knew she’d found her home.”

The Program was still in its early years, and Brann found a mentor and role model in Jacob Klein, who served as the college’s dean from 1949 through 1958. “She admired the kind of teacher he was,” says St. John’s Annapolis tutor Steven Crockett. “He was sympathetic and attentive to all his students. He didn’t lecture at them in classes; the discussions were free and open, and he became a model for Eva’s own conduct: extraordinarily attentive, cheerful. That’s the way she treated her colleagues, too.” 

Klein, a Russian American philosopher who studied under Martin Heidegger, had played a key role in the new curriculum’s success—and, like Brann and a handful of other tutors, Klein was Jewish and had fled Europe prior to World War II. “The refugees from the Nazis were a strong force in the college in the early days,” Brann said. “[St. John's Program founders Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan] were very friendly to this community.” The group of transplants, which included Brann, Klein, Simon Kaplan, and Viktor Zuckerkandl, bonded off campus over dinner parties and many a late-night philosophy discussion.

On campus, Brann swiftly gained renown among the Polity. “In the early 1960s, I was a young student, and she was a young tutor, one of only four women on the faculty at that time,” says Sharon Bishop (A65), former chair of the college’s Board of Visitors and Governors. “Eva was an important person ... Even if you didn’t know her, you knew about her. And what we know was that she demonstrated intellectual parity within a male-dominated institution within a broader male-dominated society. To a young woman at St. John’s that was huge.”

Brann’s wide-ranging intellect stood out as well: throughout her time at St. John’s, she received numerous fellowships, honorary doctorates, honors, and awards; was named a member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study; and produced more than 20 books on topics ranging from Plato and Socrates to reflections on the nature of happiness, domesticity, and time. “Eva didn’t genuinely just want to know more about books, but about anything in the world. She was endlessly curious,” says tutor and St. John’s College Annapolis President Emeritus Chris Nelson.

Brann, who delivered more than 200 lectures and addresses at nearly 100 institutions in the U.S. and abroad, was also “in constant demand as a conference speaker, and she always said yes,” Nelson adds. “And then she’d write a speech, and they were always so good to read. She had a facility with language. Her vocabulary was extraordinary, and she had this way about her that was deeply interesting and often very humorous but belonged to her alone. I don’t know anybody else who speaks and writes quite the way she did.”

Brann was named college dean in 1990 and held the position until 1997.  “She was my first boss,” says St. John’s Annapolis tutor Eric Salem, who co-translated books with Brann including Plato’s Symposium and Phaedo. “I was very scared of her at first because she was this famous authority. But she was just wonderfully friendly and made a point of saying that her door was always open.” This open-door policy applied to not just tutors in Annapolis but in Santa Fe: The Western campus opened in 1964, seven years after Brann’s arrival, and she traveled between the two campuses to teach in the Graduate Institute.

“She was always a promoter of goodwill between Santa Fe and Annapolis,” Salem recounts. “There were people on both sides who were antagonistic about the other, and Eva would visit Santa Fe for long stretches of time and come back and speak at faculty meetings about how important unity was.” Brann, in turn, admired Western culture, regularly returning to teach at Summer Classics while referring to her extended group of friends in the region—who gifted her with a bolo tie—as her “cowboy friends.”

Brann served as an educator and mentor to students, faculty, and alumni alike during her years as tutor and dean, offering perspective to all who came to her with questions about the Program or life itself. Fittingly, a group of students preparing a Star Wars skit for Reality Weekend cast Brann as Yoda. “It was explained to me that this was because Ms. Brann IS Yoda!” Nelson says. “Then she appeared, covered in a monk’s cowl, head cloaked, light saber in hand, with a mischievous smile lighting up her face.”

“One of many memorable exchanges, which left an indelible mark, was when I first joined the faculty in Santa Fe,” St. John’s Santa Fe President J. Walter Sterling remembers. “I told her I had true ambivalence about devoting myself to dwelling constantly around books that were in so many ways above us. She said that was a mirage: The books only live because we take them up and read them. If we are daunted by their greatness, the books become a dead letter. We should boldly make the best we can of them.”

When Brann wasn’t reading, writing, or lecturing, she loved to sail in her little dinghy on the Chesapeake and play the flute. She maintained long-distance friendships with pen pals around the world; in Annapolis, “she had a group of lady friends who, once a month, would go to one of their houses and have lunch,” says Heather Latham, a former assistant to the dean at St. John’s College and a close friend of Brann. “She would call them ‘the luncheon ladies.’”

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of Eva’s contributions to St. John’s College,” says Annapolis Dean Suzy Paalman. “She loved the college. Her intellectual stature made her seem larger than life, but her manner was so full of generosity and good humor that anyone could be drawn into conversation with her. It is telling that the class she taught most often in her last years of teaching was freshman seminar. She loved the Ancient Greek authors read in the class, of course, but she seemed to have a kindred spirit with our freshmen. She was always alive to the questions.”

The Greenfield Library has created a bibliography of Brann’s works in the library’s collections, with links to those works which are available online. Access the bibliography on the college’s Digital Archives.

Information about a memorial service to be held for Eva at St. John’s will be shared in the future.