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. 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. She was also visiting assistant professor at Mills College (Oakland, California) in 2001-02.īrawn’s scholarly contributions were many and significant, exploring relationships among language, gender, and sexuality. She returned to Berkeley as visiting assistant professor from 1999 to 2002, and taught as lecturer in the French department from 2002 to 2007. From 1995 to 1998, she taught as an assistant professor of French at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

in 1995, writing a brilliant dissertation entitled “Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender,” which she revised and published with Oxford University Press. Brawn then came to Berkeley for graduate school, studying French linguistics with the late Suzanne Fleischman. 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. 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.īorn Novemin 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.

Visiting Assistant Professor and Lecturer of FrenchĪnna Livia Julian Brawn, distinguished teacher, linguist, translator, and author, died of unknown natural causes August 7, 2007.īrawn 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.

Pronoun Envy by Anna Livia