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IN MEMORIAM
Anna Livia Julian Brawn
Visiting Assistant Professor and Lecturer of French
UC Berkeley
1955 – 2007
Anna Livia Julian Brawn, distinguished teacher, linguist, translator, and author, died of unknown natural causes August 7, 2007.
Brawn was visiting assistant professor in the Department of French at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1999 to 2002, and lecturer in that department from 2002 to 2007. She taught all levels of the French language, courses in French linguistics, the history of the French language, the theory and practice of translation, francophone film, and courses on gender and sexuality in literature.
Born November 13, 1955 in Dublin, Ireland, Brawn spent her early childhood in Africa, then returned to England, where she studied French and Italian at University College London, graduating with honors in 1979. After several years of teaching English as a second language in France and England, she worked the rest of the 1980s as co-director of the Feminist Press in London and published her first three novels and three collections of short stories. Brawn then came to Berkeley for graduate school, studying French linguistics with the late Suzanne Fleischman. She completed her Ph.D. in 1995, writing a brilliant dissertation entitled “Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender,” which she revised and published with Oxford University Press. From 1995 to 1998, she taught as an assistant professor of French at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. She returned to Berkeley as visiting assistant professor from 1999 to 2002, and taught as lecturer in the French department from 2002 to 2007. She was also visiting assistant professor at Mills College (Oakland, California) in 2001-02.
Brawn’s scholarly contributions were many and significant, exploring relationships among language, gender, and sexuality. Her 2001 book Pronoun Envy developed a feminist analysis of how grammatical gender is used (or subverted, or explicitly avoided) across a wide range of literary texts in both French and English to affect textual cohesion, narrator empathy, and reader response. Clearly written without jargon, the book provided an excellent overview of linguistic gender as well as a model of how to apply discourse analysis to literary texts. In 1997, Brawn had coedited with Kira Hall another landmark work, Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality (Oxford University Press), which explored the impact of language on the construction of sexuality. Her sociolinguistic studies on the use of the French Minitel, published in Sexualities and American Behavioral Scientist, offered insightful analysis of contemporary communication culture, highlighting the centrality of language in creating imagined communities. She published two major translations: Lucie Delarue Mardrus’s The Angel and The Perverts and a collection of Natalie Clifford Barney’s writing entitled A Perilous Advantage, which earned Brawn a special merit award. She was also a well-known novelist who explored themes of “coming out” with wit and an eye for the details of everyday life. The most acclaimed of her novels and collections of short stories were Bruised Fruit, Minimax, Incidents Involving Mirth, and Accommodation Offered.
Brawn’s impressive scholarly and artistic productivity was matched by her passion for teaching. Her students consistently praised her wide-ranging knowledge, her compassion, her enthusiasm, and her ability to inspire them; some identified her courses as the best they had ever taken anywhere. Brawn’s devotion to her students was absolute and she participated in systematic efforts to improve undergraduate education, such as the Mellon Faculty Institute for Undergraduate Research.
Anna Livia Brawn is greatly missed by her colleagues not only for her outstanding professional contributions but also for her wit, her cheerful outlook, and her personal warmth. She is survived by her partner Patti Roberts; her two children Asher Julian Witkin and Emma Livia Witkin; her mother Dympna Jones; her brothers Daniel Hugh Brawn and Michael Patrick Brawn; her sister Isabel (Tizzie) Francis; and the many friends and students who mourn her passing.
Richard Kern