Zena Hitz is a Tutor at St John’s College (Annapolis, Maryland), where her scholarly work centers on law and human nature in Plato and Aristotle.

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Her interest in the intellectual life began while writing an essay on Oedipus Rex as a freshman at St. John’s College in Annapolis. She studied classics and philosophy at Cambridge and the University of Chicago before completing a PhD in ancient philosophy at Princeton. Her dissertation considered Platonic & Aristotelian critiques of democracy, focusing on conceptions of democracy as driven by appetite rather than reason.

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Professor Hitz has taught philosophy at McGill University, then at Auburn University and at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She then spent three years living and working in the Madonna House Apostolate before coming back to teach at St. John’s in 2015.

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Professor Hitz believes that learning is good for its own sake: a powerful and necessary means to self-discovery and personal enrichment. In keeping with this conviction, she has sought to promote free, self-motivated inquiry in the humanities for non-traditional students: her Catherine Project is a scholarly initiative of conversation and community, tutorials and reading groups covering a range of classical disciplines for learners from a variety of backgrounds.

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She is the 2020 recipient of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture.

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Her newest book, A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, will be released this spring from Cambridge University Press.