John O’Brien, beloved colleague of the History Department, died on Monday, June 27 after a brief illness.
John received his BA from Queens College, MA from Columbia, and PhD from the University of Southern California (whose Trojans served him well in the department’s March Madness pools… except when they didn’t). He began teaching at Queens in 1965, at first covering courses in medieval Europe, the subject of his doctoral research and early publications, and winning the college’s award for Excellence in Teaching (for the first of three times) in 1968. But it was a shift of field later in John’s career, to ancient Greek history, that yielded his scholarly masterpiece, Alexander the Great: The Invisible Enemy (Routledge, 1994). This book’s innovation was to interweave the well-known details of Alexander’s biography with passages of contemporaneous poetry, be it tragedy, comedy, lyric, or epic. With historical perspectives thus multiplied the result is a portrait of Alexander remarkable for its humanity and breadth of perception. Alexander’s momentous later years, as John demonstrated, were an exquisite chaos, roiling within the sometimes wide, sometimes narrow spaces between ambition and despair, addiction and devotion, rootlessness and fantastic power.
This pathbreaking exploration of Alexander was translated into multiple languages and also became the bedrock of a new phase of John’s pedagogy at the Master’s and advanced undergraduate levels. He would go on to receive the teaching award twice more, in 1990 and 1999, with now-graduated students still attesting to his brilliance in the classroom and the profound affect he had on their lives. John retired as Full Professor in 2016; he continued his publications in retirement, but struck out in new, creative directions. Coming right up, available in July 2022, we will soon have Alexander the Great: A Lyrical Biography, co-authored with his daughter Christine O’Brien, offering an illustrated poem in 390 quatrains that is the first metrical treatment of Alexander in over a century. Before that, in 2020, came Aloysius the Great, a semi-autobiographical comic farce, based on Joyce’s Ulysses, of American and British academia featuring “a drunken history professor writing a biography of Alexander” while on a Fulbright in the UK.
Above all, John will be remembered and greatly missed for his personal qualities. His enormous kindness and generosity to his students and colleagues, his dedication to a life of service, and his belief in the mission of CUNY, made him an extraordinary man who deeply affected all who had the fortune to know him. He lived by Joyce’s words: “While you have a thing, it can be taken from you. But when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then forever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.”
