College Mourns Professor Johanna Meehan

Jan 26, 2024

Professor Johanna Meehan, McCay-Cassidy Professor of Humanities, died unexpectedly on Jan. 8 after a short illness. She was a beloved teacher, mentor, scholar, passionate about her ideas, and immersed in astonishingly wide areas of philosophy, ethics, political theory, neuro-psychoanalysis, gender and race theory, and memory studies. Prof. Meehan was loved not only by her colleagues and students but also by her invaluable administrative assistants, friends in Grinnell, and scholars around the country who remember her encouragement and support of their scholarly work through the years.

Johanna was an exceptional teacher at both the introductory and advanced levels. She created seminars entitled “The Philosophy of Hannah Arendt,” “The Philosophy of Jürgen Habermas,” and on other topics in Continental Philosophy. She also taught a course entitled “Psychoanalysis and the Intersubjective Constitution of the Self,” and created Tutorials for first year students entitled “Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, Right Wing Populism and the Assault on Democracy” and “Modernity, Morality and Genocide.” Rarely did her courses have less than the maximum number of students enrolled, even though she was a challenging and difficult grader who pushed her students often far beyond what they thought they were capable of doing. Many saw her as a personal mentor or role model of an intelligent and caring faculty member and as the model of an engaged intellectual. Students sought her out to confide in her and many have credited these conversations as having changed their lives in important ways. Most philosophy majors over the 34 years she taught at Grinnell College took classes with her, and the effect she had on these majors was both immediate and long lasting. For many who went on to academic careers, she is acknowledged as a major influence in their decision to pursue a future in academia, and for more than a few current professors of philosophy, she is the example they try to emulate.

Johanna’s excellent scholarship was focused on the Critical Theory tradition, especially Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt, and she published articles in the leading journals, including Philosophy and Social Criticism, Constellations, and Human Studies. She contributed essays to many volumes publishing top work in this tradition, and she also edited and published a major contribution to this tradition: Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse. At the time of her passing, Johanna was working on her book on the inter-subjective constitution of the self, which promised to be a groundbreaking exemplar of inter-disciplinary philosophy at its best (and rarest), drawing together empirical and clinical work in child development with her philosophical background and expertise in critical theory, psychoanalysis, systems theory, neuroscience, and gender and race studies. As one of her colleagues describes it, “her scholarly project was to provide a metaphysics of humanity in all its extra-binary complexity, requiring not just numbers, points, or state spaces, but a rich social inventory involving all the political, economic, system-theoretic, neuroscientific, genetic biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic, gender, and racial materials that go into the constitution of human selves.” She argued that human selves cannot be thought of as abstract rationalist points in bare logical space; rather, we must see ourselves as fundamentally with others, placed in space with them, placed in the sense of located within an intersecting and (possibly conflicting) set of familial, economic, gender, racial, cultural, and sexual identities. Always sensitive to the suffering of other people and having deeply felt and thought about losses in her own life, Johanna made trauma an important theme in her unbounded reading, devoted teaching, and emotionally wise writing about genocide, child development, race and gender, or political theory.

In her long and rich career at Grinnell, Johanna’s service to the college was exemplary. She served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy for one term and her intelligence, graciousness, and generosity were greatly appreciated by her departmental colleagues. She was twice elected to serve terms on Executive Council, as Chair of the Humanities Division in 2006-2008 and as At-Large member in 2015-2017. She served on Personnel Committee (2004-2006), Personnel Appeals Board (1996-1999 and 2000-2003), Committee on Support of Faculty Scholarship (2001-2003), Committee on Diversity and Inclusion (2006-2008) and served on the boards of the Rosenfield Program, the Center for the Humanities, and Peace and Conflict Studies Committee (formerly Peace Studies). Not only were discussions invigorating when she was present, but she was also not intimidated by rules or authority figures and would regularly speak truth to power. Johanna also made significant contributions to the curricular stream that eventually became the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies major at Grinnell. Her service to her discipline includes membership in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy’s Committee on the Status of Women from 1999 to 2001.

To her friends, Johanna was a joyfully social being who with her partner Maura Strassberg made elaborate dinners for birthdays, and celebrated Halloween, Thanksgiving and Passover in their gorgeously decorated house, warmly inviting in old friends and new members of the community. Ever curious and interested in exploring historical and cultural events, she brought back what she had learnt, seen, and experienced in the form of satirical and insightful stories of which she was an excellent raconteur. Johanna’s skill at weaving together ideas and emotions and her insights into human experience and motivation were expressed in deeply moving and memorable talks such as the Lilly Foundation talk about work and vocation, her eulogy for her beloved colleague Tyler Roberts, and the many effective letters of recommendations for treasured students. Evincing a commitment to expanding her own lens on experience and ways of communicating with readers, she took Ralph Savarese’s nonfiction writing seminar. The students marveled at her humility and humanity—how she allowed herself to be vulnerable as both person and professor. The liberal arts for Johanna truly meant lifelong learning.

Mary Johanna Meehan was born in 1956 in Winchester, Massachusetts. In 1977, she received her B.A. in Philosophy from Brandeis University where she was a regionally ranked member of the fencing team and traveled to Germany on a Goethe Institute Fellowship. A DAAD scholarship in 1985 enabled her to study with the celebrated German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas. Between 1983 and 1990, she taught at Bates College, Brandeis University, Emerson College, and the University of Massachusetts Boston before obtaining a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston University in 1990. She is survived by her wife, Maura Irene Strassberg, her daughters Anya Jian Ring Strassberg Meehan and Sierra Ring Meehan Strassberg (Henry Avila), and grandson Ronan James Strassberg, sisters Margaret (Dan Starer), Suzanne Mary Meehan, and Ana Michaela (Tom Michael) Meehan, nephews Ange Itzhak Gavriel Meehan, James (Anna) Michael and Matthew Eliot Michael, cousin Ellen (John) Driscoll, her father’s second wife Carrollyn Meehan and cousins from the Silva and Meehan families. She was preceded in death by her mother, father, aunt, and her brother James Francis Xavier Meehan.

For her intellectual commitments, expansive interest in the Humanities, excellent teaching, pioneering interdisciplinary scholarship, and her generous mentoring of students and faculty, Johanna Meehan will be deeply missed.