The Classics Department was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Bryan Lockett from complications of Multiple Sclerosis. Bryan was a vibrant presence as a graduate student in Classics from 1996 (MA 1998) to 2004, when he decided to pursue his passion for teaching instead of academia.
A life-long scholar, Bryan entered Montessori school in San Diego CA and read at age 3. He first studied Latin during middle school in Arlington VA, and subsequently focused on language studies at St. Alban’s School in Washington, DC where he graduated as valedictorian in 1992. He walked the full length of Hadrian’s Wall the summer before enrolling at University of Chicago as a Dolin Fellow. After earning a BA in Classics in 1996, he came to UCLA, where he received a Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award. Bryan received the Lord Scholarship for a 2001 summer session at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and later recorded videos
demonstrating Roman oratory (“Performing Cicero”) still to be found on the UCLA department website (see left). Professor Sander Goldberg, who supervised this project, remembers that “working with Bryan recording those performances was a real thrill—one of my great teaching experiences.”
After leaving UCLA, he established a new Latin department at Fort Worth Country Day School in Texas (2005), where he also directed annual student theatre productions including a modern translation of Oedipus Tyrannus. In 2009 he began teaching Latin at a public high school in Fort Worth, until the school replaced this language option with Chinese. After an amicable divorce from his wife, a fellow UCLA graduate, Bryan moved to Virginia and taught at Belle Meade School in Sperryville, where he taught not only Latin but also chemistry, supervised some gardening activities, and drove the school van. Ill health required relocation to Texas in 2014. After a diagnosis of MS, he joined his parents in San Marcos, TX and began treatment, but moved to New Haven Assisted Living in 2018. Survivors include his mother, Margaret Sharon (Atkins) Lockett, of San Marcos, TX, and older brother Joseph “Chepe” Lockett (and wife Jennifer Drummond) of Bellaire, TX.
Colleagues and teachers who shared Bryan’s time at UCLA will remember him as a superb linguist and talented critic. His main interests lay in ancient drama and performance, but extended also to ancient religion and society. Outside Classics, he was an avid reader of science fiction and a Beatles fan. His students adored him; he was approachable, concerned, dynamic, and, above all, kind. One final anecdote, told at a memorial gathering in his honor, can stand for many. After attempts to contact a staff member of the assisted living facility where he spent his final years failed, she was located in Bryan’s room, where he was tutoring her on schoolwork. He never retired from teaching. We are proud to have known him.
